Openings: Blank Map

Collage of photos I took at the Blank Map performance.

On Friday, I had the pleasure of seeing a black performance collective entitled Blank Map at the Dance Mis-sion Theater in SF.  The collective consists of artists/dancers/musicians/scholars Tasha Ceyan, Brontez Purnell, Adee Roberson, Keyon Gaskin and Wizard Apprentice.  A mix of abstract dance and music, the performance, for me, transcended the contemporary moment to an alternative spiritual space that deeply considers the body in all its states with equal weight and validity.

The tempo of experimental movement switched from tap dance, drumming and choreographed group dance to settle gestures, shadow play and performers leaving the stage/hiding from the audience.  All stages of the body (visible, invisible, speaking, silent, fast, slow, together, apart) were given equal weight as they informed each other.

I particularly enjoyed the moments when Ceyan and Brontez linked up together in movement across the stage and in shadow play.  The two bodies made me think a lot about Afrofuturism in the sense that I felt like I was witnessing energies of the past in present embodiment moving together towards a future where comfort is located in the unfixed and the idea of constant change.  This is what I took from the piece as performance is, for me, always in conversation with the spiritual.

Overall, it was a beautiful piece that has me thinking about queer spaces that are reaching through and beyond dualities, polarities and the suggested linearity of time to provide a glimpse of how bodies can exist confidently in their entirety.  The recent hate crime massacre at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando has also informed my continued meditation on Blank Map.  I am thinking about the mediation, restraint and murder of queer bodies (and in particular, queer black and brown bodies-- including queer Muslim bodies) through erasure and hyper-visibility.  I am also thinking a lot about narrative and the control of that narrative in both situations. 

I am still digesting, writing and thinking about both the performance and the tragic event in their complexities.  At the moment, in my meditation, Blank Map is serving as one site of many where queer black bodies can exist at their intersections in their entirety with power over and through their narratives.