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ABSTRACT
In this essay, I spend time with Mariana Valencia’s 2020 video-performance Solo B, which was (re)imagined for an online environment when her live commission for The Shed in New York City was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Asking what Solo B can teach us about doing history otherwise, moving through crisis, and the queer and racial politics of aesthetic form, I argue that this work enacts a vital minoritarian ethics, even as its ability to surprise invites us to embrace improvisatory practices of both meaning-making and survival.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For more on whimsy as a minoritarian aesthetic, please see Rachel J. Carroll, “Whimsy as a Minoritarian Aesthetic,” Conference Presentation, American Studies Association, 2022.
2 At the time of publication, this text no longer appears on Valencia's website.
3 Solo B is what Valencia calls “the movement score of […] [a different performance] AIR,” which has been "redefined" in Solo B through her focus on pre-Columbian sculptures (“Mariana Valencia Dissects”).
4 For more on being together in and across difference, please see José Esteban Muñoz, as well as Joshua Chambers-Letson.
5 Disorientation is a rich analytic that has been taken up by many scholars working in critical race studies and Black studies, as well as those working in dance and performance studies. I am deeply indebted to this expansive body of scholarship, even as this essay attempts to theorize a specific form of interpretive disorientation generated by Solo B, rather than actually embodied or corporeal forms of disorientation given through dance or other forms of movement and choreography. For more on disorientation, please see Jason King, “Which Way Is Down? Improvisations on Black Mobility,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, vol. 14, no. 1, 2004, pp. 25–45; Patricia Nguyen, “Project 0395A.ĐC | Performing disorientation,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, vol. 29, no. 1, 2019, pp. 88–94, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1571863; Zena Bibler, “What Can Disorientation Do? Disorientation and the Rehearsal of Care in mayfield brooks’ Improvising While Black,” Contact Quarterly Unbound, 2020, https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/view/what-can-disorientation-do#$; mayfield brooks, “IWB = Improvising While Black: Writings, INterventions, Interruptions, Questions,” edited by Nancy Stark Smith, Contact Quarterly Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 33–9; Zena Bibler, “Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, 2022, pp. 30–9, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767722000055.
6 This conversation with Stern took place in the context of another performance by Valencia titled Futurity (2019), which was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
7 These formulations are deeply indebted to Alexandra Vazquez’s rich theorizations in Listening in Detail, esp. pp. 27–30 where she engages with Naomi Schor's Reading in Detail.
8 Willis refers to a “mystery in the movement” in reference to Cynthia Oliver’s discussion of abstraction in her own work during a talk-back.
9 For more on performance as a hermeneutic for analyzing history, as well as performance in and as history, please see Della Pollock.
10 For more, please see Taylor.
11 For more, please see Taylor.
12 Here, I am riffing off of Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of being-with, as further elaborated and reimagined by Muñoz and Chambers-Letson.
13 In some ways, these questions echo Pollock in her introduction to Exceptional Spaces, where she writes that “across various planes and in multiple registers, performance shapes historical interpretation, production, and imagination, and, in turn, […] history gives performance its means and salience” (28).
14 The term "survivance" is drawn from Gerald Vizenor.
15 In this, my thinking is indebted to Amber Jamilla Musser.
16 For more on not knowing, please see Alexandra Vazquez, “Toward an Ethics of Knowing Nothing.”
17 For more on disorientation as "an act of refusal to break voyeuristic modes of consuming histories of violence and [reorient] the body to another theory of Vietnamese refugee subjectivity," please see Nguyen.
18 For more on disorientation as a practice of unknowing, please see Bibler, “Disorientation as Critical Practice”
19 For more on improvisation in dance as a practice of freedom, please see Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom; for more on contact improvisation as a practice of Black survival in the face of genocide, please see Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Michael Brown.”