Stages of Tectonic Blackness
September 13th, 8AM-8PM MST,
Sandia Pueblo Territory / Sandia Mountains Foothills Albuquerque, NM
Presented by GROUND SERIES dance collective
Conceived by Miles Tokunow
Created and Performed by Miles Tokunow, Nikesha Breeze, and Lazarus Nance Letcher
GROUND SERIES dance collective is raising funds for the first phase of our newest ongoing performance project: Stages of Tectonic Blackness. Stages of Tectonic Blackness is a many-staged performance project conceived by GROUND SERIES member Miles Tokunow with collaborators Nikesha Breeze and Lazarus Nance Letcher; it tarrys with the paralleled processes of dehumanization and extraction, emergence and rebellion, as sustained by Black bodies and rock bodies.
The works asks:
How can we understand the Anthropocene as a product of racism? (Yusoff, 2018)
How can we attune to the relation between the halflives of nuclear waste and the afterlives of slavery? (Hartman, 2007)
How can we refuse the binary of human time and geologic time by offering ritualized elongated mourning to racialized violence / earth violence? (Moten, Harney, 2016)
For a 12-hour epoch, Tokunow, Breeze, and Letcher will perform in an outdoor setting with and for geologic formations adjacent to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gathering and dispersing throughout the day, audiences are invited to enter into an experience of Black Geologic Time through their own durational witnessing of Butoh dance practice, by participating in on-site Black Studies and Anti-Nuclear teach-ins, and by engaging in communal rest and restoration practices that call upon traditions of the Black family picnic.
We need your support to raise funds to pay these artists for their cultural/spiritual/trans-generational labor. We need your support to cover quality documentation costs, so that this work can be shared widely and carefully archived. We need your support to ensure that Black communities in New Mexico have full access to this work. We need your support so that we may continue to dream this project onto national and international stages.
In a cultural moment racked with urgency, Stages of Tectonic Blackness invites us to move slowly in order to feel more deeply into this time. As a durational practice of Black queer resistance, this work prioritizes Black experience, Black time, Black bodies and our racialized relationship to the earth.
Tokunow shares, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness demands that we all link our liberation to each other and the earth, and in order to do so, we must slow down.”
