Danger, Live Feed

Danger, Live Feed Publication Note

“Danger, Live Feed” is a differential poetic event—it exists multiply in different versions including the print text in this volume, iterations of the poet’s acoustic performances, and live and recorded performances with electronic music and recorded vocals.

First presented live at Dixon Place in July 2010 as part of the 19^th Annual Hot! Festival, “Danger, Live Feed” was originally composed as a lyrical score and music track* produced for improvisational performance in Black Took Collective’s multimedia event series “Live Feed from a Black (Un)Conscious.” I have since remixed and developed it as a theatrical performance for the opening scene of my solo stage play “Thingification”**—a one woman show and PoMoFunk opera.

If ya wants mo’ funk, ya gotsta po’ mo’ funk. Trust. “(right) (write) (trope) (true)”***

PoMoFoMo, PoMoFunk: aesthetic, an advisory directive, a strategy of adjustment in the face of crisis, a multitextured superallusive space of radical critique and imagistic pleasure— a spectacular performative, and shifting oppositional space of otherness and estrangement.

Recognizing funk as the reassembly of the Black worldview fractured by urban crisis (Ruffin), PoMoFunk, a Black Feminist liberatory praxis, offers ritual intervention by means of a generative rupture. Grounded in the concept of intersectionality, PoMoFunk reconfigures the reassembled Black worldview, displacing the masculinist terms of funk’s authority in the effort to facilitate the achievement of social justice for all oppressed peoples.

Performed by Elle, a glamorous club music star, “Danger, Live Feed,”**** a PoMoFunk anthem, initiates audiences’ ritual participation in the struggle against thing-ification, the colonial legacy that works to effectively annihilate human possibility—in both potential and actuality (Césaire). The up tempo dance track (126 bpm) features layered background vocals, bongos, piano, trumpet, saxophones, polysonic synthesizer, orchestral strings, arp, bass guitar and drum machine.

The graphotext (typographical representation) of “Danger, Live Feed” designed by Douglas Kearney and featured here is informed by a recording of the poet’s live presentation at the Pennsylvania State University in October 2011 and approximates the movement and energy of that presentation and that of the oral/ aural performance of the recorded track.