Uncle Rebus

Uncle Rebus fueled a new use of language for me, inspired by my work with Claudia Rankine. I have developed a choreographic system that demonstrates how language can dance and how dance can write—marrying my two primary forms into one. Starting with the history of "Brer Rabbit Tales" and the lives of enslaved people from which these stories sprung, I printed letters onto Plexi-Glass and invited three younger dancers to spell excerpts from the book.

Deconstructing the words of Uncle Remus generated multiple narrative voices that claimed symbolic space for us as “movable types”. Typos and acronyms became tools to expand the dynamic poetry of black oral stories, long-misperceived as inferior literature. We used punctuation as a substitute for letters to generate obscure codes and “image-words” to enrich this new black storytelling. The dancers' simple tasks drew focus to their manipulations of cognitive space and language-as-bodily-frame. Passersby in High Line Park would involuntarily sound out the writing, hooked into a call-and-response that is central to black performative culture. The long duration of the dance also slows language down, a resistance to the speedy, reactive abuse of words in today’s public political sphere. This work feels like a powerful new direction for me, where choreography intervenes in literary history and young dancers infuse public space with their storytelling.