On display: the cost of being seen

My research investigates how decolonization and colonial legacies influence embodied experiences and social perceptions of race and gender. Rooted in Black Feminist Theory, this performance–staged at PS1–is both an ongoing practice and a site of inquiry, exploring how movement can reveal, and resist learned behaviors born from intergenerational trauma and survival. Through choreographic experimentation and collective process, my practice seeks to dissolve dualisms — mind/body and visibility/invisibility— that have historically structured the lived realities of mixed-race women. The performance adopts a museum-like experience, allowing audiences to roam and determine their proximity to the performers. The performers will dissolve the audience/performer during dualism by challenging the conventional relationship, thereby asking the audience, "Who’s really on display?" Performers utilize their embodied knowledge, transmitted through both personal and ancestral experiences, as the movement of vocabulary. By positioning movement as intellectual labor and embodied critique, this research illuminates a decolonial methodology that reclaims agency, disrupts binaries, and (re)imagines conditions of being, witnessing, and knowing.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25820/mqsw-v137