I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom

Notes

argue, “The identity dilemma for the black majority is not captured by the declarative ‘one ever feels his two-ness,’ but rather by the interrogative ‘how do I break these all-too-real chains binding me?’”67 In Last Night on Earth, Jones laments: “I think that even those of us who have no notion of what the auction block was can still feel it, as if the memory of it is handed down to us through our mother’s milk. . . . It is there with me when I dance before you on a stage.”68 When seen in the context of this history, Ghostcatching’s blue images of con‹nement ring all the more forcefully . As for the absence of skin, in discussing the prohibition of mobility under slavery, Baker notes: “The body’s natural ‘color’ was converted into a legalized marker of oppression. There was, in the total institution called slavery, an epidermalization of oppression. Skin color—in combination with facial features and hair texture—became southern grounds for maintenance of the ideological and economic project of White Supremacy.”69 While one’s various identity claims—racial, ethnic, class, religious, gender, sexuality, place, generation—by no means ‹t tidily along clear color lines, racism is nevertheless largely a visual pathology. Unlike Jones, Paul Gilroy likely would embrace Ghostcatching as further evidence that we have already moved to a point where vision-based race thinking is out of date. His controversial book Against Race, published in 2000, has infuriated many scholars with its call to eliminate liberal race-based thinking in the hopes of a humanism that would manage to move beyond the color line. Most relevant to Ghostcatching is Gilroy’s claim that new technologies , particularly in the medical ‹eld, have begun to transform what he calls “the old, modern representational economies that reproduced ‘race’ subdermally and epidermally.”70 He argues that advancements in molecular biology, which show that race is genetically virtually insigni‹cant, as well as the development of imaging technologies such as ultrasound and electromagnetic radiation, have enabled new forms of scrutiny regarding the human body. Gilroy asks: “Have you, has your body, your child’s body, ever been scanned? Do you recognize its changing optic density? If so, perhaps you could consider that development another compelling sign that we have begun to let the old visual signatures of ‘race’ go.”71 A few pages later, engaging head-on with what Baker describes as the historical epidermalization of oppression whereby skin color became the grounds for white supremacy, Gilroy claims: “Today skin is no longer privileged as the threshold of either identity or particularity. There are good rea136 i want to be ready sons to suppose that the line between inside and out now falls elsewhere. The boundaries of ‘race’ have moved across the threshold of the skin. They are cellular and molecular, not dermal. If ‘race’ is to endure, it will be in a new form, estranged from the scales respectively associated with political anatomy and epidermalization.”72 While motion capture is undoubtedly part of a range of new technologies that enable new mappings and forms of scrutiny regarding the body, these advancements in technology have done little if anything to alter the general public’s conception of the human body. We are a long way from realizing a utopian humanism in these increasingly ›uid borders. It is in this context that Bill T. Jones stood in front of students at NYU, asking, “Are we past a point of racial looking? Why can’t I be free?”73 At the same talk, Jones told the students that the ‹rst thing he did upon entering the packed auditorium, without even thinking, was to look around to count the number of black faces in the audience. One could say that Jones was speaking from a tight place, especially regarding his supposed turn to form. He wants to foreground the how of dance, and yet he constantly reminds us of the stakes involved. He seems frustrated with the onus of always foregrounding the political, and yet he is a black man dancing. At one moment, he professes an interest in turns and pointed feet, while a moment later he sings “We Shall Overcome.” It is from this tight place that Jones calls for his doubling: “Can you see with two sets of eyes?” It is also from this tight place that Jones, together with Kaiser and Eshkar, created Ghostcatching, which, especially when shown as part of The Breathing...