By Suzette Sagisi
A note from HMD
With the intention of sharing learning about the work of decolonizing our physical practices, HMD is happy to share reflections by dancer and HMD Board member Suzette Sagisi on a recent project, BLACKSTAR, with choreographer Maurya Kerr.
An Introduction from Maurya Kerr
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, blackstar (a performance that was set to premiere April 2020), became BLACKSTAR (a film). I entered this isolated, personalized, sheltering-in-place process with the dancers armed with one movement phrase and an urgency to explore what a decolonized mind, body, and imagination might look like, feel like, act as, dream as. And ‘armed’ feels regrettably apt, given the savagery of white supremacy. All of us (including white people) have been deeply colonized—some minds, bodies, and imaginations of course much more violently and fatally than others.
What I expressed at the close of BLACKSTAR’s initial screening can’t be said enough: don’t get galvanized only by Black and brown trauma and death and the spectacle that gets made of them. Please get as galvanized, if not more, by Black and brown joy, quietude, brilliance, tenderness, and dreaming.
BLACKSTAR exists as my documentation of our communal endeavor, of their bravery. I also asked each dancer to offer me some document of their process: below is Suzette’s brilliant self-reflection.
////
On Embodied Feeling, Intentionality, and Decolonizing Movement
By Suzette Sagisi
Throughout the process of making BLACKSTAR, a dance film created by Maurya Kerr of tinypistol, Maurya asked us, “How might a decolonized body move?” My attempt to answer involved a further question, “What is virtuosity?” The necessity of the second question felt both important and unnerving. White neo-colonial (1) standards of dance (of most things, really) are so deeply pervasive and stubborn that what is considered virtuosic in American and European concert dance is inextricably linked to what white culture has colonized and continues to colonize.
“Oh, look,” I'd tell myself as I worked through the movement phrase for BLACKSTAR, “your colonized mind—and, in turn, body—is showing.”
My internalized oppression runs deep.
It’d show up in many ways. In rehearsals, I would catch myself defaulting to conditioned habits and wanting to demonstrate certain abilities that are accepted widely as virtuosic in white concert dance in America and Europe. For example, I would showcase my ballet and postmodern training, attempt to look as long and as thin as possible on camera, and prioritize abstraction, which involved trying to not appear ‘too’ emotional or aggressive. I was dancing for the white spectator. But that felt off and unsatisfying and irresponsible to the work, myself, and my pursuit of more culturally equitable dance.
I also tried actively to incorporate movement elements from my hip hop background, but that seemed to me like playing the ‘othered’ role of feeding into stereotypes of how Black and brown bodies move. I’ve learned that, in amplifying a distinction between what white supremacist culture asserts as the aesthetic standards of concert dance and what it considers ‘urban’ or ‘ethnic’ or ‘gritty,’ Black and brown bodies performing the latter often become more agreeable to white audiences. Reductive, yes. Oppressive? Also yes.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm performing being brown by exaggerating or making obvious my decision to hit or pop certain moves, display rhythmic variance, ride a beat, or “be grounded” because I've ended up a reflection of the way others in power—mostly white people—see and value me. And by doing so, I perpetuate their biased expectations. This loop of white expectation and my performative response continues ad infinitum until I don’t know where the caricature of me ends and the real me begins. What helps me to find that delineation, or, more strictly, a grounding, is when I don’t have to dance for white-dominant audiences or in primarily white spaces. Usually when I’m with my Black and brown friends, with my family, or alone in my room without task or expectation, I can be and dance like myself, still playing with rhythms and dime stops and incorporating other hip hop elements as well as elements from my ballet and modern training. But it’s no longer a show. And I can feel the difference.
I don’t want to or believe that I need to dismiss completely my Eurocentric training because it is also a part of me. As Peiling Kao, a dance educator, artist, and friend of mine said, “I don’t want to devalue what I have cultivated in my dance trainings, even though they are mostly European/American, because they are all mine.” They belong to artists of color, too. What I reject is the idea that ballet, modern, and postmodern are the only or superior representations of a universal virtuosity. And even more, I want to safeguard against the assumption that they are necessarily examples of virtuosity at all.
As a non-Black person of color, specifically, a Filipinx-American, I have both suffered and benefited from white supremacy culture. In dance—in everything—I am trying to both i) exist and move as my full self in my brown body and ii) confront my own privilege in that body.
During the BLACKSTAR rehearsal process, Maurya gave us a task: to embody feeling. Each of us dancers took on this task separately through personal research. We began with learning a movement phrase that was gestural and at times extremely kinetic. Maurya provided us imagery to help us better understand the vocabulary and origins of the movement. For instance, she described one specific movement as “a reaching across with a feeling of both feathery and furry...smaller, bigger, diaphanous.”
In thinking about these images alongside doing the moves, I found myself unfelicitous in completing the task of embodied feeling (which Maurya defined as distinct from dancing emotionally). I felt like I was hiding behind layers of ideas and habits. I felt like I was leaning heavily on the imagery and, even more so, my beliefs about them. Everything was so noisy in my head! Maybe all the thinking and goal-reaching was superfluous. Counterproductive even.
Perhaps the body is enough. Perhaps my body is enough.
I thought of the questions at hand. A search for decolonized bodies moving. A dropping of attempts at “virtuosity.” And more than a trying on, what I (read: my body) needed was a letting go.
So, I just did the moves. Over again and in different ways. And I listened to my body. Insofar as I could, I did only what I wanted with the movement. Then I felt something. Sometimes it was joy. Lots of times it was anger (about not ‘getting it right,’ about how tired my body was, about loving dance styles that don’t love me back, about Black people being killed, about structures that are antithetical to equity, about getting older, about not doing enough, about thinking too much, about defending my and my loved ones’ experiences to white acquaintances, and a thousand other things that were and remain opaque to me).
This alternative approach of release and listening through repetition evoked a kind of moving for me that was qualitatively different than my first attempts. I was able to get to something that was nuanced and honest and cathartic. Intentionality made the difference. I use the word ‘intentionality’ here not in the colloquial sense, but as defined by contemporary Western philosophy of mind and language, i.e., the representation or contents of my mental states or what my mental states are about. I was able to tap into this mode of moving and feeling when the intentional object was my moving body, as opposed to my thinking about moving from or with my emotions.
Any resulting emotion I had from moving felt okay so long as the intentional object wasn’t a concept, but the body itself. That’s to say, with this approach, what I was reacting to—what I was feeling and thinking about—was what my body was doing. I understand this difference in intentionality as the causal arrow going in the opposite direction of my initial efforts. Rather than first having an idea that elicits a feeling, which then moves me, I move first and whatever I feel—joy, pain, freedom—results from the movement. A more accurate term than ‘embodied feeling,’ then, is ‘felt embodiment.’
The movement is enough. My body is enough.
This somatic practice of felt embodiment, a kind of de-intellectualizing of the process towards decolonized moving, allowed me to center myself and my own body without the myriad normative lenses and overtly (and overly) scholastic approach towards which I often gravitate. Frequently, and here in this case, I find a Western academic approach to be an instance of colonization. My turning to the body itself and listening to it seemed less so.
Admittedly, talk of the body as the object of intentionality might be criticized as replicating the colonizing mind-body split. That is not my aim. I want to assert not an account of mind-body duality, but instead a kind of embedded sense of thought and feeling within the body. Because the body is a thinking and feeling thing, I do not need to focus on a separate additional thought (or image or idea or emotion) in order to access or express through movement what I am thinking or feeling.
Having the body itself, rather than an image, feeling, or narrative, as the intentional object resulted in an encouraging outcome of feeling embodied and embodying my feelings. One compelling explanation as to why this is the case is that the human body has some kind of special, direct access to what human beings need. For my brown body, what I need is a centering and caring of Black and brown bodies, and the very act of doing so is a decolonizing one.
I don’t know what a fully decolonized moving body looks or feels or acts like or if it is even possible as long as we live and move in our current structures. But I am learning what the process of getting closer to such an ideal might be. I believe that the oppressed, othered body—in this case, I am speaking particularly about the Black or brown body—decolonizes itself when it sheds what’s been forced upon it. I believe that Black and brown movers decolonize themselves when they care for and center themselves, take up space, and move so that they may exist freely and fully, whether in ways they’ve been excluded from or that have been dangerous for them historically and culturally, or in ways that white supremacy culture tries constantly to dismiss or discredit or appropriate. It’s the non-Black body, such as mine, listening to, holding space for, and moving in true solidarity with Black bodies. (2) It’s more Black and brown movers in all spaces. I see these as acts of returning to our decolonized selves.
Watch BLACKSTAR HERE.
Watch a clip of Suzette in BLACKSTAR HERE.
(1) Here I say ‘neo-colonial’ (‘colonizing’ would also work) in an attempt to account for different temporalities, but I haven’t found a clearcut or satisfying solution for talking about different types and times of colonization.
(2) I am still trying to figure out how to do this, especially in isolation with no shared physical space. The BLACKSTAR process happened during COVID-19. I’m curious about how it might have been different if I could have interacted in person or virtually with the other dancers.
////
Born and raised in California, Suzette has danced for artists such as Beyoncé and Fabolous, and has appeared on shows such as MTV's Made and America's Best Dance Crew. Her company credits include Hope Mohr Dance, Sandra Chatterjee, Maurya Kerr’s tinypistol, Brice Mousset, James Alsop, Gerald Casel Dance Company, dazaun dance, Katie Faulkner's little seismic, Zhukov Dance Theatre, and others. Suzette holds a bachelor's degree from UCLA and a master's degree from Tufts University, both in Philosophy. She serves on the board of HMD and resides in Berlin, Germany.
You can reach Suzette at sagisi@gmail.com or on IG @suzettesagisi.
Maurya Kerr is a Bay Area-based choreographer, educator, performer, poet, and the artistic director of tinypistol. She was an ODC artist-in-residence from 2015 to 2018 and holds an MFA from Hollins University, focusing her thesis on how systemic racism denies Black and brown people access to wonderment—her choreographic work is an extension of reclaiming birthright to wonder. Maurya was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years and teaches extensively in their educational programs. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hole In The Head Review, Blue River Review, River Heron Review, Inverted Syntax, and Chestnut Review.
You can reach Maurya at mk@tinypistol.com or on IG @tinypistol.