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Reviewed by:
  • Sitting on a Man’s Head
  • VK Preston (bio)
SITTING ON A MAN’S HEAD
Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York, NY

The last performance I saw before Covid-19 closed theatres was Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s Sitting on a Man’s Head at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan. I saw the performance on March 6, 2020, the night before New York City declared a state of emergency. The show was sold out, and I hurried through the East Village hoping for a spot on their waiting list. Granted a ticket after the rest of the audience had entered, I walked into the performance space, finding the church hung with white curtains from rafters to floor. Voices rose from inside this silk installation, hiding the singers behind the fabric from view. At the center of the room, a concealed mechanism under the ceiling made the silk curtains sway. Their rhythmic motion set billows into movement, animating the space of the church. A docent offered me a journal with a writing prompt, asking what each viewer carried that in turn carried them, signalling affective and somatic release.

The docent paired me with choreographer and writer Will Rawls. We greeted each another, tapping elbows with an unfamiliar gesture supplanting hugs and handshakes, borne of the pandemic’s quickly shifting interpersonal codes. My recollection of this experience now feels somewhat citational, its account shifting into many voices after reading two volumes of writing on this durational [End Page 39] performance by Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Ralph Lemon, Fred Moten, among many others, who contributed alongside Okpokwasili’s writing and verse to Utterances from the Chorus (2020).1 Comprised of drawings, interviews, and numerous critical texts, the book compiles a broad collection of interdisciplinary meditations on the durational practice, shaping a renewed platform for dance artists in the medium of the catalogue.

Okpokwasili’s durational performance, scheduled for four-hour, Friday-evening sessions, and the growing body of writing surrounding this work, trace connective tissues underlying public experience. In what are now two digital editions available on Danspace’s website, Utterances I and II aim to document the collaborative, public-facing events interrupted by the pandemic. The multi-lingual responses to Okpokwasili’s practice, including drawings, text, photography, and song lyrics, take up the urgent realities of Black Lives Matter’s global mass protests, the deadly repression of Black lives across the nation, and over the rise of the pandemic’s unequal losses, coming to boil with the tragic and unjust murder of George Floyd. Covering this overwhelming span, the catalogues trace expression and movement entangled with catastrophe, a term I draw here from the chorus itself, its crossing and return: strophe and antistrophe.

Opening the first volume of Utterances from the Chorus, Ishmael Houston-Jones observes that St. Mark’s Church was itself almost certainly built by enslaved labor on Indigenous Lenape traditional land. I later learned that St. Mark, a North African born of the Jewish faith in Libya, was honored in name at this American site of a 1660 Dutch colonial family chapel. Rebuilt at larger scale during the time of the French and Haitian Revolutions, the church’s activities inevitably reveal its long trajectory of Afro-diasporic worship, forced labor, and displacement. Its grounds once included a cemetery for those enslaved by Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of the New Amsterdam colony, and contained burial plots for members of that congregation’s slaves and their descendants. (Their remains have allegedly since been removed to build residential housing.) This history and Stuyvesant’s remains in the chapel are now at the center of a two-year cycle of lamentation and apology for the parish’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.2

Behind me, inside the silken installation, the felt timbre of a tall man’s voice moved my body with his breath. I felt its grain slide improvisationally across range and register as Okpokwasili’s artistic collaborators and visitors become increasingly indistinguishable as the night unfolded. The silk boundary surrounding us billowed like a sail tethered to a ship’s boom as our voices seemed to travel collectively in place. I...

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