Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy

Zena Bibler

doi:10.1017/S0149767722000055

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Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy

Journal article

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Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy

Zena Bibler

Dance research journal, Vol.54(1), pp.30-49

04/01/2022

DOI: 10.1017/S0149767722000055

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Abstract

This article examines how mayfield brooks uses spatial, discursive, and vestibular disorientations to intervene within anti-Black regimes of perception in their Improvising While Black (IWB) workshops, which draw from their ongoing life/art project by the same name. Drawing from insights gathered through my participation in IWB workshops as well as through conversations with brooks and other workshop participants, I examine what brooks's guided disorientations do, that is, what they produce kinetically, perceptually, and relationally among participants. I show how brooks's disorientations expand on Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown's conceptualization of racialized regimes of perception by revealing a set of choreographic tropes that undergird those regimes. These include perceiving from a vertical posture, leading movement from the head, navigating based on visual cues while inhibiting responsivity to other senses, turning away from cultural and ancestral context, and relating to self and others as individuals. Drawing on examinations of disorientation within contemporary dance practice and critical race theory, I argue that brooks guides participants into disorienting improvisations that draw attention to, refuse participation within, and generate otherwise possibilities to this choreography.

anti-Blackness

disorientation

falling

improvisation

otherwise possibilities

regime of perception

sensitization

somatics

witnessing

Details

Title: Subtitle: Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy
Creators: Zena Bibler - University of California, Los Angeles
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Dance research journal, Vol.54(1), pp.30-49
DOI: 10.1017/S0149767722000055
ISSN: 0149-7677
eISSN: 1940-509X
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
Number of pages: 20
Language: English
Date published: 04/01/2022
Academic Unit: Dance
Record Identifier: 9985178668202771

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