Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and mourning in Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance

Abstract

I sit in a theatre in San Francisco in December 2021 feeling a palpable anticipation in the air. As Gerald Casel performs a choreographic accumulation to TLC's ‘Waterfalls', my body remembers learning Accumulation in dance history class. Indeed, words are soon projected on the back wall: ‘I am performing an accumulated sequence'; ‘It's an adaptation of Trisha Brown's choreographic device'; ‘She made a dance entitled ‘Accumulation' in 1971'. This performance is Casel's response through the body to the unacknowledged racial politics in postmodern dance and is the primary study of my investigation. In ‘Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and mourning in Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance', I analyse Not About Race Dance (2021) choreographed by Gerald Casel as a queer, decolonial performance that engages with mourning as regenerative refusal. In this article, I define constructions for queer dance and decolonial performance that are foundational to my reading of Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance. I then outline the relationship between Not About Race Dance and Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance. The titles of both works use irony to emphasize that the performances are, in fact, about AIDS and race respectively. Finally, I argue that this queer, decolonial performance work encompasses interplay between refusal and racial mourning, and propose that this performance is a manifestation of queer, decolonial performance and embodying the profound heaviness of loss and mourning that occurs because of racism. This is significant because it reveals the connections between queerness and decoloniality through performance and examines their links as acts of refusal and mourning in the work of a queer, BIPOC improvisational artist.

Keywords:

• Improvisation
• Embodied Decoloniality
• Queer Dance
• Postmodern Dance
• Gerald Casel
• Artistic Research
• Regenerative Refusal
• Decolonization
• Mourning
• Racial Melancholia

Sitting in a white box theatre, I witness three dancers positioned in front of a projection of a street view of shifting places in New York City from the late twentieth century in dim lighting. The space is empty save their bodies. A driving sound is the undercurrent to the scene. One dancer begins a monologue in Spanish. She beats her fisted hands against the outside of her thighs while turning rapidly and making short shrieking sounds. She stops. She looks at the audience for a moment before continuing her speech as two dancers on the ground face each other and make slow, rolling shifts downstage. The trio stands in a line downstage gazing at one another until the two on the outside look at the audience and say, ‘Welcome to Purchase.’ With the monologue, we hear a driving, ominous electronic sound. She takes soft steps towards the audience while the other two dancers make waves with their arms out to the side and travel outward. ‘Name?’ they ask. ‘Karla.’ ‘Where you from?’ they antagonize. Her expression is perplexed. A disembodied voice from above interrupts with, ‘OK, let’s begin.’ Karla takes a deep breath and folds her upper spine into curve, chin dropped to chest, upper body bouncing along with the other two dancers who are now at a great distance from where she stands. Reaching one arm overhead to curve to the side, she says in English, ‘I feel so unsexy.’ As arms swoop overhead to curve to the other side she says, ‘I feel like a fucking child’, pointing to the infantilization of this dancer of colour in a predominantly white space. With a sweeping chasse a fourth dancer enters, and together they both do triplet steps, sweeping arm gestures, turning jumps. As they move with increasing speed he says to Karla, ‘I think that we should join forces to finally put an end to this bullshit.’

In December 2021, Gerald Casel premiered Not About Race Dance on the white box performance mainstage at CounterPulse in San Francisco. The dance leads the viewer through worlds that ask us to consider the many legacies of colonization embodied through dance, tracing what Royona Mitra calls ‘the fundamental link between a dancer’s lived reality and their arts’, addressing the importance of the individual in performance (2015: 31). This queer, decolonial performance work encompasses interplay between refusal and racial mourning. I come to this work as a queer, South Asian woman who is in dialogue with dance practices as a choreographer, a writer, an educator, a performer, a curator and a scholar, with many of these roles intersecting and overlapping. I am an improviser and dancemaker with ties to lineages of postmodern dance in my own creative practices that inform how I interrogate postmodernism in dance. In this article, I outline constructions for queer dance and decolonial performance that are foundational to my reading of Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance. I then discuss Not About Race Dance’s relationship with Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance, whose ironic title similarly emphasizes that the performances are, in fact, about AIDS and race respectively. Finally, I propose that Not About Race Dance highlights the ways in which race and queerness are experienced as intertwined instances of refusal and mourning that challenge and dismantle structures of postmodern improvisation. In doing so, they create a manifestation of queer, decolonial performance and embody the profundity of loss and mourning that occurs because of racism.

About halfway through the performance, all of the dancers gather on the ground at the front of the stage, look tentatively at one another and begin to mutter, ‘It’s cute’ or, ‘Yeah, it’s cute’ or, ‘Cute!’ In the dim light, a single dancer, Styles Alexander, places a mic stand downstage, as close to the audience as they can get, clearing their throat as the amber light comes up on their face. They have something to say. Glancing up towards the live musician, they count off, ‘1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4’ and punk guitar music fills the space. Alexander begins screaming lyrics into the mic, gripping it with two hands and shifting their weight from foot to foot. They pull the mic into their body, rocking it off its stand, as though bringing it as close to their mouth as possible. This interruption of the dance space points to their own body and their own queerness, saying things like, ‘My thighs are fucking perfect’, ‘My throat is full of power’ and ‘My skin is dry as fuck from this California air’. They howl as the audience cheers. Inaudible at times, this song is a release. With a final scream into the mic, they yell, ‘I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m so fucking gay’ and jet off into the space, frenetic limbs extending out and collapsing back in. This proclamation has freed them into a space of full expression.

Queerness is central to understanding the refusal and mourning present in Not About Race Dance. Queer dance can act as a form of world-making for both performer and audience to bring life to worlds unseen or co-imagine new ones. I begin this article with an enquiry into how queer dance is defined, because there are as many definitions of queer dance as there are people writing about it. I approach an expansive notion of queer with caution because such expansiveness runs the risk of presenting everything as queer dance, and thus nothing is queer dance. However, Clare Croft proposes that queer dance is ‘a force of disruption’ against the hegemonic, normative, confining constructs (2017: 2). I define queer dance as dance that takes to task that which is defined by canon or movement form to challenge how our bodies can be in the world. It is an act of disruption in the way that Styles’s performance interrupted the flow through the performance score with a punk song that named what hadn’t yet been made explicit: that this was a queer performance. Croft identifies that there are connections between dancing and queer that emphasize a ‘coalitional sensibility’, insisting that queer dance is ‘draw[ing] on a more expansive notion of “queer,” a broader challenge to social norms’, which expands outward from LGBTQ identities but is not overly saturated to the point that everything becomes queer (ibid.). I would take this a step further and suggest that Casel’s work links queer activism and dance, making the dance itself an act of resistance through the creation of coalition and drawing attention to contemporary social issues in queer BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and other people of colour) communities: a quiet activism, but an activism nonetheless.

At the intersection of race and queerness Casel has many vantage points, but always returns to a space of being at odds with the dominant systems of power. The company employs dancers who identify as queer, and the piece is set in the context of the legacy of queer dance, but more than the identities of the performers, the piece goes beyond by subtly building a queer world. Each of these entry points to queerness indexes a capaciousness required to resist. At times, songs of mourning and identity (like the punk song) are performed. At another moment, the dancers disorient the audience through the use of technology, turning our perspectives upside down and queering the world we witness. These queernesses work against homogeneity and contribute to the tenderness of mourning in the performance. Casel’s work is an example of queer improvisation because of its embodiment of disruption through being at once a dance performance and a mode of activism.

Slowly, the lights rise on all five dancers standing centre stage looking directly at the audience. They stare longer than is comfortable, implicating the audience and drawing attention to our position as voyeur or viewer. Taking steps forward and backward they shift their torsos towards the direction that they walk, crossing back and forth across the stage, but their focus remains on the audience. Their faces are nearly expressionless. They act as audience or voyeur, taking in what they see. The speed of their walking pattern increases, but their gaze remains fixed on audience. They are breaking the wall between the audience and the performers while remaining in their stage space. Unlike the expressionlessness of many postmodern performers, they are reclaiming their bodies through the act of returning the gaze and not only being the object of performance. You, too, dear audience, are part of this performance.

Though formerly colonized subjects have advanced decolonization as a radical movement for decades, its meanings and applications in performance and popular culture still need to be explored. bell hooks writes that

since decolonization as a political process is always a struggle to define ourselves in and beyond the act of resistance to domination, we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future. (1992: 5)

The emphasis on imagination, future and creativity is a critical element to identifying decoloniality in creative praxis. Identifying the decolonial in the creative praxis of performance is both about the event itself, and the before and aftermath of it. Walter Mignolo (2014) points to decoloniality as ‘a long process that takes place at several levels in different times’ and that if we can understand gestures as movements of the body or limbs that are meant to be expressive, then a decolonial gesture ‘is a body movement which carries … a decolonial intention’. Importantly, decoloniality is ongoing, evolving and constantly challenging the status quo or dominant narrative. Catherine Cole proposes that decolonizing is ‘not about closing the door to European or other traditions. It is about defining clearly what the centre is’ (Mbembe cited in Cole 2020: 125). Similarly, Prarthana Purkayastha proposes three modes of a decolonial rethinking of dance through ‘reclamation, retrospection, and reparation’ so that what is created are ‘decolonial acts that unearth, unsettle, and undo history’ (2020: 29). The ongoing unsettling of history and redefining the centre is paramount to Casel’s performance work.

Not About Race Dance invokes a decolonial approach in interrogating, but then detaching from, many of the holds that postmodernism in dance has had on Casel’s body and creative process. Engaging critically with a movement form dominated by whiteness and white people, Casel performs a decolonial act, which as theorized by Mignolo, and further emphasized by Catherine Cole, involves ‘the undoing of the power structures that have created a whole range of oppressions and hatreds, including racism, sexism, and homophobia’ (2020: 100). As authors such as Danielle Goldman (2010), Rebecca Chaleff (2023), Arabella Stanger (2021) and Zena Bibler (2022) among others have demonstrated, whiteness in postmodernism in dance is the dominant power structure. Casel’s work as an artist of colour within this lineage of whiteness in postmodern dance takes mourning to the realm of racialized experience and drawing in decoloniality. Casel addresses this in ‘Lineage, mimicry, and ambivalence’, stating that

while I acknowledge and honor my experience with Petronio (and his connection to Trisha Brown and her association with Judson Dance Theater), I feel an element of tension around it. That element is race. Most on the Judson genealogical path are whiteidentified. (2018)

However, Casel is able to cultivate something else on stage. It is through the supportive, nourishing relationships fostered on stage, the understanding of self through the performance and love, that decoloniality is able to interweave through the work. The work of decoloniality in performance hinges on connection, creativity in the face of unknowing and bringing to the centre that which works against the domination of whiteness, all of which, I suggest, are acts of love. Love is demonstrated in the performance when the dancers utilize live feed cameras to see the other dancers up close. It exists in the dialogue where one dancer seeks camaraderie with another to push against the ‘bullshit’. It is foundational to the tenderness with which Case approaches the ‘accumulative sequence’, a choreographic device developed by Trisha Brown.

TLC’s song ‘Waterfalls’ (1994) begins playing as the lights rise on a stark square stage. A single dancer, Gerald Casel, walks into the space from the downstage corner. Projections rise on the back wall. Casel begins an accumulated series of gestures, adding one movement to the phrase with each repetition as words are projected on the back wall as though they are being typed in real time: ‘I am performing an accumulated sequence’; ‘It’s an adaptation of Trisha Brown’s choreographic device’; ‘She made a dance entitled “Accumulation” in 1971’. Casel’s hips sway as he reaches turned in arms forward and then draws them back towards his body, resting his hands facing up at his hips, a nod to Brown’s original pedestrian choreography and to the rhythmic bounce of the music. As his movements become faster and more vigorous, the accumulation builds upon itself: Casel shifting his weight from side to side, kicking his feet out to the bass line, and the text projected on the scrim tell us that Casel attended the premiere of Not-About-AIDS-Dance and that the work made ‘HIV more visible … more real’. The sequence ends with Casel bringing together pedestrian arm gestures from postmodern vernaculars with knees bouncing, hips shaking and popping the chest forward and back. We are brought simultaneously to the concert stage and the club.

The beginnings of improvisation are often linked to postmodern dance, and improvisatory performance in the context of US performance has had the undergirding focus of liberation and freedom from its inception but has been historically exclusionary (Goldman 2010: 16). Contributions to postmodern dance improvisations from BIPOC lineages have been shrouded and BIPOC artists have not received the same levels of recognition as their white counterparts (ibid.). Danielle Goldman enquires, ‘why has … improvisation not made more progress with regards to race?’ and proposes that improvisation has not made more progress in this direction because of social and systemic barriers, stating that ‘white dancers tend to invite their white friends and colleagues to dance in white spaces’ that has led to ‘an insufficient reckoning’ with race in contact improvisation spaces (73). If, as ‘dance artists and performance scholars have argued … choreographies onstage and the choreographies of daily life are interrelated’ then it is important to reconcile historical understandings of improvisation, but actively incorporate work from contemporary and historical BIPOC artists into the field (70). The bodies participating in the movement form matter, and representation within movement forms matters.

As the beginning of the performance, the ‘Waterfalls’ section frames the work as both an interrogation of postmodern dance and an act of refusal. These themes connect it through time and space to Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDSDance (1994) and, by extension, both Casel and Greenberg’s dance training lineages with Trisha Brown. Not-About-AIDS-Dance is a movementbased response to the immense loss that Greenberg was facing: over just one year he lost his brother and eight friends to the epidemic. Greenberg uses projected written text to convey the gravity of the work as well as placing himself, his lineage and his present circumstances as central to the non-narrativity of the piece. Like Casel’s projections, it is through the disclosing text that he creates tender intimacy. Greenberg writes that it was important to not only ‘“come out” as being gay and being HIV+’ in the performance, but also ‘to make clear that the deaths of [his] friends … were from AIDS’ (Greenberg 1995: 3). He identifies the political motive but acknowledges that more than that, ‘there was personal need’ (ibid.). Casel takes the act of disclosing further by making clear that whiteness in postmodernism has had a lasting impact on his brown body. The projections go on to tell the audience that Casel is ‘a brown body dancing in a big, white cube’, which is repeated on the projections at the end of the piece, indicating a tension about the way that Black and Brown bodies occupy space in postmodern dance, particularly in improvisatory spaces, like the one created on stage. As a result, the viewer has some fragmented ideas about Casel’s lineages of alienation, hybridity and unbelonging that perhaps served as impetus to make the work.

Not-About-AIDS-Dance was created through Greenberg’s act of mourning that itself turned to the mode of performance to demand attention and activism. By placing this often-censored thematic content on stage, Greenberg makes ‘a demand for their grief and loss to be taken seriously and to be respected’ when the grief over these deaths in the queer community was being disregarded (Gere 2004: 168). Public mourning by way of performance then becomes a tool for activism and protest. In other words, when other people can see the mourning of injustice, it has no choice but to become political. Like Greenberg, Casel created Not About Race Dance because of ‘personal need’ to make ‘protest of something in our experience that we find nearly unbearable, but something that is inescapably a part of life’ (Greenberg 1995: 3). Greenberg acknowledged that Not-About-AIDS-Dance has ‘political use’; however, for Casel an imperative political element was missing (ibid.). Thus, these two works share similarities in the irony of their naming, but Not About Race Dance addresses both queerness and racial tension in a way that Not-About-AIDSDance cannot. In the next section, I investigate Not About Race Dance’s relationship to refusal and mourning in how it references the past but looks towards a more ‘capacious and hospitable future’. I draw on David Eng’s work on racial melancholia and Maile Arvin’s work with regenerative refusal to support my argument that the bringing together of queerness and decoloniality in Not About Race Dance results in the expression of mourning and refusal.

Not About Race Dance seems to embody and process what Cathy Park Hong refers to as minor feelings. This phenomenon is defined by Hong as ‘the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed’ (2020: 55). She continues, ‘minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance’ (56). This cognitive dissonance seeds mourning. When one can’t be seen in their racialized reality, we are left to grieve experiences that can’t be seen by structures of whiteness. For Casel, the structure of whiteness is postmodern dance. Casel (2018) writes about how his brown body is perceived in postmodern dance spaces, stating that ‘because I work in the lineage of postmodern dance, my brownness cannot be unseen through the white gaze projected on its white canvas’. This white canvas is intentionally placed before the audience in the choice to perform Not About Race Dance in a white box. In writing about whiteness in postmodern dance, Casel is clear that whiteness in postmodernism has had a lasting impact on his brown body. Casel (2018) states that ‘Black and brown immigrant bodies who mimic movements generated by white bodies produce a certain level of ambivalence’ because ‘whiteness assumes a kind of unmarked-ness, while bodies of color are read through codes and metaphors that underscore racial phenomena which convey power and privilege only to certain groups’. Casel (2018) further asks, ‘How do we address and reconcile race within the project of modernism? What comes after postmodernism?’

Casel emphasizes a sense of in-between that Black and brown bodies occupy in postmodernism. I might suggest that we read this in-between as a site of mourning where there is no place for minoritarian subjects to land. The impulse for me is to answer Casel’s question: This performance work is what comes after postmodernism. The work seems to hinge on the in-between: the title, the juxtaposition of sound and accumulation, vast sections of cavernous silence, and even in the movement form presented on stage. For many racialized, diasporic-bodied people, the in-between is simultaneously in between home(s), and home itself. Royona Mitra writes that there is a rewriting of ‘the third space as an embodied and lived condition’ in order to ‘collapse the conceptual segregation of space and body as distinct entities’ (2015: 101). Because of the use of projected text in the performance, the viewer is told that Casel has lineages of displacement, alienation, transnationalism, and hybridity in his existence, but what we learn from the piece is that the site of reconciliation is the body. It is through the body that he becomes. But we also know that there remain certain complications. There is, as Mitra writes, ‘a more complex relationship between diaspora and homeland … suggest[ing] that for a second-generation diasporan the relationship between diaspora and homeland is as inseparable as it is demarcated, and as painful as it is nourishing’ (2015: 95). In the simultaneous pain and nourishment, there is still the loss, and thus mourning in the diaspora. But ultimately in Not About Race Dance the performers locate this third space as one that ‘offers an alternative and empowering way to understand and own one’s sense of displacement, a condition associated with the diaspora’ (94). This third space is separate and made up of changing proportions of its parts, almost never equal, always creating new meanings and representations. It is not one half whiteness and one-half brownness. Nor is it one-half postmodernism and one-half not postmodernism.

Despite its complexity and the inability to pin down the third space in its everchangingness, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s use of the concept of racial melancholia ‘to refer to histories of racial loss that are condensed into a forfeited object whose significance must be deciphered and unraveled for its social meanings’ informs how racialized subjects exist in the third space (2019: 2). SanSan Kwan proposes that this melancholia is ‘an understanding of non-whiteness as fundamentally melancholic’ (2021: 22). Along similar lines, Kwan proposes that queer negativity ‘assumes oppositionality as the ontological condition of queerness’ (21). In other words, queerness is always against something. Likewise, decoloniality is ongoing resistance to colonial forces. This negativity and melancholia might be considered a direct response to the pressures of assimilation that led Casel to making this piece. He writes,

Assimilation has always been a subconscious edict. Further complicating matters is the fact that we (Filipinos) have been colonized by numerous countries, so the colonial mentality is deeply ingrained in our psyches and subjugated bodies. Rather than harmonizing with the background, assimilation feels like blending in so as not to be registered as an alien – akin to camouflage. It has taken me years to cloak my Tagalog accent in order to sound ‘American’ … Imagining what my lineage would be through an ancestry site seems preposterous, since as an immigrant, I have long been trying to divorce my identity from my past while imagining what it would be like if I didn’t have to blend in. (Casel 2018)

Casel’s writing and the performance work ‘demonstrate the ways that Asian Americans carry an abiding sense of loss inherent to their identities as marginalized subjects’, reminding us that Asian Americans are ‘subjects who are determined by compromised national belonging, failure to achieve the impossible imperatives of assimilation, social pressures to fulfill the model minority myth, and general illegibility in the face of dominant white culture’ (Kwan 2021: 56). Like Casel’s ruminations on assimilation, Eng and Han propose that when BIPOC are implored to adopt dominant norms like whiteness and heterosexuality, they experience a loss and those ongoing losses ‘establish one melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization processes in the United States precisely as a series of failed and unresolved integrations’ (Eng and Shinhee 2003: 344). Dominance begets a sense of failure, but Casel’s work addresses this sense of failure by generating refusals against dominance.

Not About Race Dance very specifically takes on Maile Arvin’s concept of ‘regenerative refusal’. This refusal comes in response to the ways that whiteness promotes possession and ownership, and Arvin defines it as ‘actions that seek to restore balance’ by divesting ‘from racialized and gendered hierarchies’ as an ‘ongoing reckoning with settler colonialism’ (2019: 130). This sets the tone for regenerative refusals to generate ‘future-oriented acts aiming to realize a different way of being in and relating to the world’ (131). Casel’s piece brings together queerness and decoloniality to generate an act of refusal through both engaging with and critically refusing the whiteness of his postmodern dance lineage. As described above, it does so through integrating social/club dance form and postmodern language, the use of technology to subvert the gaze, a return of the gaze from performers to audience and the use of improvisation.

Apparent from the start of the work, Casel’s reimagining of the opening accumulated sequence to music from popular culture demonstrates ‘regenerative refusal’ by not allowing the constructs of the piece that he is referencing, created by a white woman in the 1970s, to exert ownership over the process of making a performance work in the postmodern genre. By drawing in both popular styles of dance and postmodern ideas Casel can ‘refuse the settler colonial order of things’ to bring together multiple genres of movement practice (Arvin 2019: 21). In acknowledging the inbetween through his use of multiple movement forms, including his own postmodern lineage, Casel engages with an act of regenerative refusal by subverting structures of power and possession in movement forms, while he himself creates work in lineages that have histories of stealing from Black and brown communities and then repackaging them as innovative ways of moving. Casel names his colonizing lineage and destabilizes it to engage with the future possibilities of how we relate to one another, the spaces we occupy and the world.

Moreover, these refusals could be viewed as ‘a form [of] passive resistance to self-divulgence in the face of a colonial presumption of intimacy, a way to retain the borders of the self in the power-laden contact zone’ with colonialism, what Kwan terms ‘a decolonial politics of Asian passivity’ (2021: 47). Passivity in Not About Race Dance also takes the shape of melancholia and queer negativity. It can be in uses of technology, where performers utilize live feed cameras on stage to disorient the viewers’ gaze in the projection from various places on stage and in the return of the gaze from the stage as the performers take a walking pattern back and forth across the stage for several minutes looking into the audience. Refusal also exists in the way that work relies upon improvisational scores. As Kwan notes, ‘improvisation … makes room for the coexistence of potentiality and failure, availability and refusal’ (2021: 104). Refusal, even necessary refusal, sets up the process of mourning what could never be.

In this mourning there are ‘worldmaking possibilities’ in the ‘queer-of-color practices of disidentification’ theorized by José Esteban Muñoz (Kwan 2021: 74). Kwan offers that ‘insisting on a radical politics via hope and futurity, Muñoz cites these performances of disidentification as strategies of survival for queer-of-color subjects’ (ibid.). These survival strategies are ‘embodied expressions that can be utterly seen and kinesthetically felt, even if not always understood’ and in doing so generate future worlds that are otherwise from what is already here (Cole 2020: 110). Further, Rosemary Candelario importantly points out that ‘Asian American choreographers and dancers have remained largely invisible’, which results in mourning the inability to be seen (2016: 10). Not about Race Dance ‘asks its viewers to act as witnesses to unresolved violence, and by naming these actions “mourning,” the choreographers demand that the audience question the nature of the emotion itself’ (Candelario 2016: 133). This mourning is not just an ongoing sadness. The performance demonstrates that mourning can look like skipping and laughing together. Or like recounting painful memories of the first day of college. Or like staring into the audience demanding to see and be seen. It can also look like reimagining an iconic postmodern dance work through the lens of one’s own immigrant, queer lineage.

Not About Race Dance is about race. It is also about the embodiment of queerness and decoloniality and it is about mourning the many losses of what was and what could have been amidst a landscape of racism. Casel interrogates postmodern dance as a microcosm of larger issues at hand. As I write this, I am sitting with the news of another mass shooting of queer, BIPOC in a night club in Colorado Springs and know, both in my body and in my scholarship, the importance of work like Not About Race Dance. The performance becomes a space where Casel’s ‘minor feelings’ about working in postmodern dance are externalized (as perhaps ‘major’ feelings) and applied beyond the dance. Casel is able to create a performance lineage with Neil Greenberg’s work, but more than that, take to task postmodern dance and how Black and brown bodies are perceived, treated and denied visibility. The work imagines through the immensity of loss and mourning, and rather than attempting to resolve the past, it is able to use the lenses of queerness and decoloniality to find a way forward. In other words, Casel’s work isn’t attempting to change the perspective on the past in order to make it OK in the present. It is calling attention to what exists in the present to invoke a movement for change – in this case, towards anti-racism.

This article attempts to make a space of recognition for a queer, BIPOC artist, Gerald Casel, who is challenging white histories of postmodern dance and attempting to undo that which has been learned in his body for the sake of a queer, decolonial future. The manifestation of queer, decolonial performance makes a world on stage where refusal generates new futures and new worlds beyond the stage and asks difficult questions about dismantling structures of postmodern improvisation. By asking these questions, Casel challenges notions of whiteness and assimilation in postmodern dance and engages with both queerness and decoloniality as ongoing praxis. The work does not solve a problem. Rather, it makes visible what disempowered artists working in this form have always known and asks us to reflect, grieve and challenge. It is a reparative work. As Candelario reminds us, there is an importance to the way that dances are able to ‘offer a possible way forward – a sort of choreography for survival and beyond – by corporeally working through a recurrent crisis and its aftermath’ (2015: 167). For queer BIPOC, seeking safe space, in the club or on stage, is ongoing, fraught with grief and necessary. Not About Race Dance gives audiences the opportunity to imagine otherwise, to seek out autonomy and to mourn with and for one another.