Andros Zins-Browne premiered duel    H at Danspace Project February 1-3, 2024. With this work, he extends his inquiry into relationships between bodies and ecology, exploring fluidity between humans, animals, and land in their potentialities. Inhabiting a space where binaries such as care and violence, human and non-human, above and below might intertwine, the performance rearranges the hierarchical terms we habitually stand on.

Read or listen to Zins-Browne's reflections and choreographer's notes on duel  H.

I’d wanted to use a Nina Simone track, “Mississippi Goddam,” but it was tough to get beyond the context Nina’s singing about. I wanted to begin with it because it spoke to the history of a land. She curses Mississippi, but also Alabama, Tennessee… In some versions she curses Alabama’s Governor George Wallace, but for the most part, she’s just cursing Alabama. Praying for it too. She sings, ‘lord have mercy on this land o’ mine.’ She says it’s all in the air, but she’s cursing the ground. Land that we still call by their indigenous names— Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee; Misi-zibi, Alibamo, TenAhsee… What happens above ground, spills into the soil but always comes back up, or—what goes down must come up— the unequal reverberations of a recursive movement—an unwritten contract we must have made with the ground a long, long time ago.

That pressure Nina sings about, might be in the air, or it might be in the underground of an upside down world.

Occasionally, I’ll say, bless a YouTube algorithm. In the middle of trying to make the Nina track work—and knowing somewhere along the way that it couldn't, ‘cause what Nina was singing was too specific and cut too deep off the bat—Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Didn't It Rain” popped into my feed. It felt jovial, celebratory, even if ultimately it was still singing about an apocalypse. The story of Noah’s Ark as a mass extinction event, that was also an intentional purging, clarifying, making way for life to re-emerge. But she brings a different tenor to the idea of a climate catastrophe—one you could sing about on your way to Church. And we were, afterall, in a Church.

What’s a land acknowledgement? Ever since they appeared on the institutional scene, appropriated from their indigenous origins, I’ve had mixed feelings. Grateful, as someone who considers himself a native New Yorker, to be reminded that I’m not, and have never been native to the place I call home. Grateful to acknowledge that I’m just a guest here and that the ground beneath us has absorbed so much that it never invited, grateful to acknowledge that what’s hidden is also always felt, like Nina says, in the pressure of the air but also under our feet, supporting our physical and metaphysical real estates.  

…Lastly, Danspace Project is located in the St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery on the Lenape island of Mannahatta, Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland. Danspace Project pays respect to Lenape land, water, and ancestors past, present, and future. And let’s take this moment to acknowledge that construction of this building was completed in 1799. That same year New York State enacted the Gradual Emancipation Act, so we can assume that this building in which we sit, stand, dance and some still worship, was built with the labor of enslaved people on the Lenape island. We pay respect to these ancestors as well. Thank You.

What work is this reminder of the land acknowledgement doing and for whom? Is it offering us a praxis? A means to cede unceded land back to its previous stewards or offering any mechanism for reconciling these crimes? And I don’t know—it's good to say we acknowledge, we’re aware, the past is present, but and also, the acknowledgement always exists in language, whereas the acts in question happened in the felt experience of bodies. I don't know if or how language can ever reconcile that.

But if we were gonna speak about land, then the convention of the land acknowledgement was part of it, a moment to try and lend body, to move with the words, try and meet the presence of spirits whose land we were speaking about. Those included as Ish-—Ishmael Houston-Jones reminds us—the unnamed labor of enslaved peoples that likely built the Church. 

The person, whom for visa reasons I can only refer to as H, offered breath as a form of body, a speculative voice reaching towards the bodies breathing in their own ways, beneath us.

Steps could be misrecognized as neutral, unless we know where they began. That they meet the contents of what we call floor. That ‘floor’ is not surface but volume, container, absorber and a reflection of what’s above—though that also might be too passive as the same could be said of us in relation to it—an absorber, a reflection of what’s below.

Amidst the majesty of growth, gravity and foundation, are so many fissures filled with all kinds of horrors—we can name them, in any incomplete manner we may—terror, violence, theft, enslavement, forced assimilation, abuse and assault, genocide—first and foremost of the indigenous population. But we can’t see that content, not with our eyes in this day. But if we can feel what’s been spilled beneath us, then our steps and our dancing meets those things too. 

Dancing is supported by these things, things I say, immaterial as they may seem, that compose the ground we step, dance, worship, plant, rest, bury, and find new ways to forget on.  

So what’s beneath? And what’s above? What’s active and what’s inert? What’s alive and what’s dead?  What’s past and what’s present? Who’s background and who’s protagonist?  We often find these false choices as categorized and created to essentialize one or the other, curated by whomever benefits from the terms of these categories, and so it goes.

Or, 

Or, I wanna find bindings and unravelings that support both/ands and neither/nors. I want one to take on the other’s properties until they stir towards something else—third, or fourth, or thousandth—a living condition that’s a walking contradiction, a contradiction called in as unproblematic, even seemingly self-evident. I want to see what organization and interaction look like when those contradictions are the fact of the matter, a ground that implausible but not senseless, an implausibly senseless ground to support our activity. Or, activity—lets call it choreography—that supports an implausibly contradictory ground.

As above so below 
as below, so above. 
So below as above, so below.

…And they keep on sayin’, go slooow…

Dance, like most of human activity, tends to take the ground for granted. The ground is one of the few things in this under supported field that alas just seems there for us—supporting the human as the primary protagonist to do their thing. Whether the dance we do on it is loved, or hated, or ignored, the ground is still there for us. 

But what about the subjectivity of the ground? What about a ground that's not just there for us but for itself and its own community? The ground is not inert, it's not just there. Its choreographies moving over vastly larger dramaturgical frames, in gestures we can’t fathom.  Just 20,000 years ago, the Lenape land of Manahatta, where I was born and where toilet paper, air conditioning, and the hot dog were invented, the island where St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery now stands, was buried under over a mile of ice. 

The ground moves, shifts, its forces redistribute, pushing and pulling with unimaginable violences. 

That dance. 

And we’ve emerged from that land—carrying and re-distributing those violences on micro-horizontal scales—within a strata of human, nonhuman and animal movement that is perpetually unsettling and unsettled.  

Last summer, I made duel C with Ley and Kris Lee who I created duel    H with—we wanted to find ways to uncouple violence from harm and care from carefulness. How could violence and care—the spirits of being with and against also be both ands and neither nors? Here we wanted to rotate these questions vertically—to think not only about the violence and care we (or the fiction we call ‘we’) offer each other but also towards the land, the violence and care we offer it, and the violence and care it offers us.

We start with a dance underground. The landscapes of our imaginaries are tar pits, fault lines, glaciers, sinkholes, wind traversing, displacing water, creating waves, hitting cliffs, grinding rock, building mud, swamps, canyons, rifts. Unconformities which are breaks in time where sediment erodes, binding with other formations or ceasing—due to sudden events—to accumulate. We call it a plot—a story of the land, a land that’s not a body but not not a body, our bodies as not the land but not not the land.

In The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin begins at the end like this:

Let’s start with the end of the world, why don't we? 
Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

That’s where we started. And I thought about H as what was left of earth, at the end of earth. 

Or, I could say: we start in stillness, under a ground, an earth of our making. Underneath the enormous ruptures that must have been summoned to create fossil fuels, to think of that destruction and compression as what now powers the car I sometimes drive, the plastic toothbrush I use twice a day, the electricity I’m speak to you through right now. To think of a landscape of that material—the cycles that produce life and petro-energy as also those that consume life and energy. The materiality of death that we extract in order to expend so we can power our own exhaustion. I don't mean that in a doom and gloom sort of way, doomy and gloomy as it is, but more like Sister Rosetta Tharpe reminds us:


Lord send the angel a warning to you
It began to rain and now you are through

Rain of oil, rain of dirt, rain of the ground falling on us, a new land forged by the material of decay. What emerges from the stirred pot of organic and inorganic, the flipping of over and below? Who are those lives, intrinsic to the land but not the idyllic, passive, organic nature we once imagined?

Not human, not not human. Sister Donna Harraway reminds us, of the humus, from the organic matter of the earth but not hu-man. The Black pessimists taught us to consider Blackness as already non-human, extra human. Don’t give me that, ‘but we’re human too’ shit. Cause we’re not, we’re more than. We’re of the land, made of dirt, working a land which is also us. In this landscape of petro mountains—and I should say, we did do our best to source previously used plastics and donate it all for future use, but I’m not sure that’s an absolution of our own complicities—we get to work mining the land, but “we” is also the land, so this work extracts and exhausts us too.

In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff  writes:

The racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance. This means that the idea of Blackness and the displacement and eradication of indigenous peoples get caught and defined in the ontological wake of geology. 
(end quote)

So, you know, the land is a remainder in a process we’ve called Geology which separated us from the land in the first place, but rocks have memory.

Sister Yusoff continues: 

Racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert. In the nonconsensual collaboration with inhuman materiality as both a property of energy and in concert with other energy sources (sugar, coal, mineral), slavery weaponized the redistribution of energy around the globe through the flesh of black bodies

Lord send the angel a warning to you
It began to rain and now you are through

But we’re not. 

Or, we’re through as in ‘by way of’. That ‘by way of’ might be an ending, unless we’re just beginning. If the process of defining the human was by way of creating a discipline called Geology, to create strata between us and the rocks below, which necessitated another stratification we called race, which required an economy to support it all, which involved defining certain races as sub-human, in order to pair into an arranged marriage—an extractive relationship with the sub-strata of land. The project to separate ourselves from the land has only been what’s buried us, because there was nowhere to put the below, except above, and no one to put it over, than ourselves.  

But to be through all that, would be to emerge through a consideration of the materiality of Black and Brown bodies as coextensive with the land free from practices of extraction. Unlike our colonial pasts where bodies were purchased with the very material- gold- their labor was used to extract- flight. Flight, towards a future where like Sister N.K. Jemisin’s Orogenes, Black bodies express through the land both will and affect. To remember the rocks the way they remember us. To try and form them the way they’ve formed us—an act of care as a response. She say: ‘it looks like you want to go there, grow there, move that way. Let me see if I can help you.’

We move the land, it moves us, we’re of the land, we’re not it, but not not it. We’re low to the ground, descendants of both the sub-and-the-poly—we’re low, and many. We’re not individuals, not divided, nor stratified, we’re a rhizomatic body- polytemporal, not measured, symbopoetic, syncopated. 

Realizing ourselves through forms of differences in relation and sometimes those relations are consumptive or extractive, but also sometimes you know, we’re just fuckin’ with each other.  

Landscapes don’t cut their own form, form is the result of something at play—I’m fuckin’ with you cause I love you, I love you so Ima fuck with you. Moving with doesn’t mean moving in unison which might be violence,  and it's with care not carefulness that we move against, move shit where we think it should go, for many reasons or none at all which is also a form of liberated labor. Disavowing classification, evaluation, or harmonies borne of lowest common denominators. Eco-fluid, sometimes we’re the land, sometimes not, sometimes in concert with it, sometimes dominated by it, sometimes, we’re just fuckin’ with each other.

And we rise up too. We clear out too. We make room, like the mountains did. Soak up what we can, grow as much as we can, take what we can and move with it. Like the mountains and the stones, we’re not good, we’re not stewards, we’re of the land we come from, and not it, not not it, it's not our fault. 

The Destructive Character, Brother Walter Benjamin wrote:

Sees nothing permanent… sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined.

What’s left then, what remains?

KJ said:

You all made the church huge once all the excess was removed
revealing the decay in the ceiling of the church.

Elliot said: 

That blue fabric, she stole the show!

Elinor wrote:

Motions of digging, carrying, and cradling the material recall recent images of Gaza that flood social media timelines and are seared into my mind. I think of people in Gaza who return where their homes once stood, now obliterated beyond recognition, searching for their missing family members and friends, digging through rubble with bare hands.

I shuddered at that reading for how concrete it was. And I guess I was embarrassed as an artist who tries to maintain (hide behind? Or relish in?) abstraction. And yet, I gotta acknowledge- there was basically nothing else on my mind at the time I started making this. 

I couldn't pull anyone out from under the rubble, but I could try and revive the image of under from the ways it had been desecrated. I could try and tunnel beneath the celebrated lands of clarity and transparency, if clarity and transparency is an open plane premised on sub-alterity.  

I couldn’t help but see the assaults as fundamentally acts of trying to render people back into the land, while the perpetrators tried to  convince themselves that we’re not essentially all dirt. Of course we are.

Our aspirations to build upwards as the quest, to distance from the ground; to elevate but also evaluate, categorize, and implement existences and deaths as either over or under. But when the ground dances, it dances above.