Creative Research Proposal - TT PhD
Grandfathered In: a queer re(mix)ology
Guiding Research Questions
How might a queer re(mix)ology trouble time and space and help us to explore existential issues of queer exile, migration, and belonging through creative research and performance?
How does the uncanny past continue to (re)emerge as, or haunt, the visible present through lineages of rupture?
How might mixedness as queer epistemologies help us expand, better recognize and appreciate nontraditional methods, or creative research practice?
Project Goals
The purpose of this research is to investigate mixedness as a queer epistemology that seeks to cut across rather than divide up the map of humanity. The aim of this project is to expand lineages of discourse and interrogate the apartheid often erected between theory and praxis, subject and object, knowledge and the body, form and the invisible. This project seeks to resurrect lost songs of ancestors known and unknown, real and imagined, and to interrogate traditional research methodologies by centering radical syncopations of the inscribed body in and through Black queer performance.
Contextual/Lit Review
In Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, Sharon P. Holland argues that “bringing back the dead…is the ultimate queer act” (Holland). By resurrecting my ancestors (real, imagined, or chosen) through the performance of my body, I seek to reexamine the oppression of European serfdom in relationship to the trauma of chattel slavery and racism in the US at a few interrelated sites around the world. Because my body performs an uncanny mixedness, it opens a mode of queer inquiry, or in(queer)y, as well. This queer mixedness is “uncanny” in that the ghosts of both my African and European ancestry haunt my face making visible the “transgression” of miscegenation between two lineages that have both survived the trauma of slavery in the US and of colonialism, globally.
Beyond racial hybridity, I begin to define, or undefine, mixedness as both a “thing” and a “process,” a bio-psycho-social phenomenon that rejects notions of purity and embraces epistemologies that traverse boundaries of body, culture, and nation. However, queer mixedness is not only diasporic eruptions of space and body but syncopations of time that challenge our notions of how the uncanny past disrupts and (re)emerges in the present through the “embodied spatio-temporal events” we call performances (Hannah and Harsløf 13). Here, I must also note that I am working from parts of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theory which seeks to collapse the hierarchy of text over body/labor, by (re)framing an ensemble of theatrical “aspects: text – space – time – body – media” (45). Working from this premise, I continue a discourse that seeks to investigate how all of these aspects are texts that can be both read and written blurring the lines in a hybrid exchange between performers and spectators, the observed and the observing, object and the subject, praxis and theory.
Mixedness as a queer epistemology also aligns with the Foucauldian notion of genealogy as lineages of disruption that reject history as an unbroken continuity that “map the destiny of a people” through the search for a “hierarchy of origins” (Foucault 140,146). Rather, queer re(mix)ology, as I call it, inscribes the body in relationship to chance based on innumerable, human disparities. As a form of bricolage, genealogy is a ubiquitous, interconnecting, chance-driven, bodily inscription that accents the events of history as “its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats,” what I call, radical syncopations (Foucault 144).
Investigating mixedness as a queer epistemology not only recognizes multi-racial ancestry but seeks to demonstrate how mixed queer ways of knowing expand lineages of radical interventions through the hybridization of traditional and creative research practices that embrace “non-normative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (Halberstam 6). Queer re(mix)ology is a methodology for how intersectional and interdisciplinary artist-scholars, like myself, position their own body-stories within the inter(text)ual lineages that collage across space and time in uncanny ways.
Project Overview and Methodology
Building on the research theses of my MA and MFA studies in postdramatic and postcolonial theory, jazz aesthetics, and Black queer studies, I want to note that my Queer Makishi project is an ever-evolving festival of masks that mix, queer, and collage stereotypes, story, and displaced lineages. Therefore, I view this current project, Grandfathered In: a queer re(mix)ology, as an extension of Queer Makishi, the celebration and succession of masks that I began in the original devised film. In this phase of the project, I seek to take a step outside of my inner-personal content to dive into the archives and psychogeographic wanderings of two of my great grandfathers from different sides of my biracial family. I seek to construct two additional masks in this festival inspired by these two men wrestling with what Jack Halberstam might call “the queer art of failure,” but in two ways: how I fail to ever really touch or tangibilize these paternal ghosts that live in the DNA of my body and secondly, in how these two great grandfathers participated in projects that ultimately failed but emerged as unexpected triumph or surprise.
Although my primary field is theatre and devised performance, I seek to frame this work as an interdisciplinary, practice-based research “project” that may or may not culminate in several different intermedia products: a concept album of original and covered folk music, a new music/dance/theatre per(form)ance, an installation of both traditional and embodied research and audio-visual archive, a gallery of self-portraiture embodying my ancestors, a series of psychogeography journeys tracing the literal spaces that my grandfathers traveled toward a documentary film.
As a point of departure for this project, I seek to place my Black-mixed-queer body-as-discourse in conversation with two great grandfathers from different sides of my biracial family who represent radical syncopations in my biological lineage: Dunker (Johann Georg Käsebier) a German serf who escaped religious persecution to come to 1724 Pennsylvania and Fuel (Fuel Williamson) who was a formerly enslaved Union Soldier of the US Colored Infantry who attempted to escape Jim Crow Laws of Tennessee to help found an all-Black colony in 1878 Kansas. Having been adopted and brought up by an all-white family in Mississippi, my estranged positionality (re)presents an additional level of rupture in my lineage, a queering that I seek to interrogate in this performance-based project.
Over the next three years, I intend to research the genealogical/biographical information surrounding two of my great grandfathers, Dunker and Fuel, by searching through the archive, traveling to various geographical locations to conduct ethnographic and psychogeographic research. Back in the studio, I intend to use both autoethnographic and devised performance practices to transpose this research into a critical collage materials for performance/installation/film that (re)mixes song, dance, ancestry, and story with object, costume, lighting, and sound design.
I must emphasize that the devised performance practices I utilize are embodied research methodologies that center the body-as-text and place it in critical discourses at the interaction of race, sexuality, post-dramatic theory, and Black music aesthetics. Atr present, these embodied research methodologies and performance practices are built on three major “points of departure”:
Eugenio Barba’s Theatre Anthropology and “recurrent principle"
Postdramatic theory which seeks to describe the phenomenon of theatre practitioners who invite the audience to witness theatre as co-writers of an ensemble of theatrical aspects in a flattened hierarchy of: space, time, body, media, and object.
Jazz aesthetics, primarily:
jazz time as queer time, or radical syncopation,
jazz improvisation as queer space, a liberatory technology to navigate structures of power, and
jazz body as queer body, a “signature sound” that embodies the ancestorial influences of the performer; and finally
Finally, as an extension of my work with jazz aesthetics, I want to highlight my jazzmorphia practice, a laboratory-based methodology (building on intermodal shifting a concept borrowed from art therapy) in which I seek to transpose what I experience in jazz music through five modalities: listening/witnessing, moving/dancing, sounding, mark-marking/drawing, and stream of consciousness writing. My intention is to continue to use this improvisational structure as a way to negotiate archival materials and transpose this material in and through the body. Jazzmorphia is an experimental practice that ultimately supports various states of creative flow generating new material for performance and scholarship and is a performance in itself.
Proposal timeline/structure of the project:
First Year – conduct major archival research, literature review, and begin to embody this material through self-portraiture, movement score building, songwriting, and my jazzmorphia practice.
Second Year – launch a psychogeographic campaign and collect documentary audio and film materials by traveling to specific sites by railroad and ship retracing the journeys and literally walking in the shoes of/wearing the period fashion of these two great grandfathers as an experimental social practice.
Third Year – After two years of research travel, collecting, archiving, and works-in-progress showings, year three will be dedicated to constructing and sharing the final performance, film and installation materials and writing/editing the 40,000 word written portion.
Indicative Bibliography
Defrantz, Thomas F. and Anita Gonzalez. Black Performance Theory
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” From Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Eds. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Cornell University, 1977.
Hannah, Dorita and Harsløf Olav. Performance Design
Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity.
Johnson, E. Patrick and Mae G. Henderson. Black Queer Studies.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans.
Moten, Fred. Black and Blur.
Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory.
Taylor, Diana. Performance.
What support do you need from your advisory team?
The primary support(s) that I need from my advisory team is to:
help me explode my current ideas for this project and break unconscious rules that may be limiting my perspective and growth as an artist-scholar.
Be a sounding board that connects my work and ideas to practitioners that I do not know of whom my work resonates.
to hold me Accountable to the regular practice of the work, and the sharing of ideas.
to advise, support, and offer feedback around constructing clearer project frames, storytelling structures, and issues of impact and audio-visual meaning-making.
