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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.

Please read and/or listen to an essay below by Nora Raine Thompson, a dance artist, former staff member of Danspace Project, and PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU. In this reflection, she draws from her knowledge of St. Mark’s Church, conversations with Zins-Browne, and writing from scholar and poet, Fred Moten, who is an advisor of her academic work. 

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Underground
Under the ground
Beneath the earth
Below the surface
Be low

To exist
An ex-pression of
Ex-
A life out of / from
negation

When life on earth seemed uninhabitable,
We went under
sub
-stance
-liminal
-sists

Subterranean growth
Subterranean light
Subterranean joy

 — Andros Zins-Browne 

croak, sing
bury, tuck in
fight, play
banish, shelter
tidy, hide
ground, ground
there were always more than one

My notes from duel    H, jotted down in the dark, reflect a dance of blurry distinctions–perhaps, memories that can’t be sorted, the imbrication of caring gestures and violent gestures, the multiple meanings of ground. These notes seem to mirror the marginalia that pepper my copy of Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, a few chapters of which I re-read the same week I saw Andros Zins-Browne’s latest work. So, maybe of course, as I read the program for   duel    H, I can’t help but remember Moten’s assertion that, “​​care and violence are entangled.”[1] I let his voice echo throughout my witnessing and this response.

I enter Danspace Project on duel    H’s opening night, February 1, 2024, to find a black tarp spread on the floor of the sanctuary, punctuated by hills, unsmooth. Another black swath is draped, taut, from the balcony, like a traditional velvet traveler curtain that denotes the upstage of a proscenium. I hear what I learn later to be a live recording of Sister Rosetta Tharpe performing "Didn't It Rain." 
“Some moaning, some groaning, some groaning, some praying,” she sings. There is only one visible body – H, the vocalist – clothed in layers of black and white, sitting nearly motionless beside the draped tarp, holding a microphone in their hands like a delicate bird. I have a tiny flashlight in mine, like the rest of the audience. We received no specific instructions for what to do with them, but the spectators act as spectators often do, and try to see more. Thus, when the lights cut out in the middle of a land acknowledgment delivered by Danspace curator Seta Morton, who happens to be donned in a vibrant red keffiyeh, flashlights begin to click on. I wonder, were we meant to sit in the darkness of Morton’s recitation? Or step up to illuminate what can only be seen with the attention of many?

Zins-Browne is thinking about how performance can confront histories of brutality. This work follows up his duel c (River-To-River Festival, 2023), which was created in dialogue with Charles Gaines' Moving Chains to feel out the dancerly contours of political action in the wake of 2020’s uprisings. In our conversation preceding duel    H, he tells me that he is continuing to think through how struggle and care manifest within movements of resistance, but, this time, through the lens of the forceful separation of human and land. His questions link up inevitably, for me, with the realities of settler colonialism here and elsewhere. 

I hesitate to click my flashlight on. I wonder, not for the first time, about my own socialization to always try to see more, see into. [2] I question if this particular landscape, created by a Black artist dealing with questions of violence, is for me–me, a white audience member, me, a writer attempting to read this dance–to see more, see into. This little flashlight is a tiny locus of choice. How does Zins-Browne want this dance to be seen, and by whom? How do I want to be a witness, a participant? 

I am distracted from this decision of light when I notice that the ground crinkles and glistens in the handheld light of others, making me question if the hills are moving or if my vision is. Have you ever tried to watch a single star in the night sky while walking? It jumps and flickers and bounces. But you are the bouncing one. I am sure the audience’s hands are quivering as they hold their flashlights, but then, I am also sure that the lumpy ground is stirring, breathing. A single voice, H’s, whispers, croaks, hums, moans, and groans (and perhaps prays, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe foretold), amidst silence and soft breathing. The ground is alive, readying itself to transform and reform into and out of human bodily shapes. I think of a question posed by Moten: “What shape must culture take when it is so (un)grounded?”[3] 

As light eventually suffuses the space, flashlights slowly click off–we realize we can see without them. We glimpse an arm, a tattoo, a hand refolding tarp around itself, as the hills spread and sigh. Bright red socks. Evidence of life. Unclear how many. Life, like a sandcrab who, once uncovered, wriggles determinedly to burrow back beneath the surface. When she is uncovered again, it could be the same one, or it could be someone new. Unclear how many. H’s moans turn to exclamations, almost words, as moving bodies become more defined. There are three–Zins-Browne, Kris Lee, and Ley–who attempt to keep remaking each other into the ground. They wrap each other up in the crinkly black stuff. Roll each other into new obscured pockets. I wonder about how much air they need, under there. They wrestle among the surfaces that once hid them. A ball of conflict, a tumbleweed of tarp with a foot here and a hand there, rolls across the expanse. They push flesh and plastic and readjust flesh and plastic and then push again, carefully. Two of them stop, mid-wrestle, and smile at each other. 
 
Tarps, once evacuated by humans, are to be cleaned up. The dancers condense them, use their knees to squeeze the air out of the crevices, squish them down to stow them away behind the vertical smooth black swath. Loose tarps tidied and subdermal bumps deflated, H slips away out of the sanctuary, and the dancers get under the big flat piece that remains. Re-lumping it with their bodies and disturbing its evenness, they finally expose the wood floor, an island of flat soft tiles–those connectable squares you let a baby roll around on–and a bundle of blue cloth. Unfurling the blue fabric curiously (no object remains untransformed, it seems) it turns into a blue carpet, a river treadmill in constant motion, to be run along, to be laid atop, to be pulled, to be pulled back. Wrapped around a column, it becomes temporarily taut before it is re-bunched. It must be cleaned up too, gathered up and tucked behind. 

There’s not much left to be put away. Bundles of tarp are bulging from behind the single smooth one, hung–evidence of the work that’s been done. A conspicuous lump remains downstage, larger than the others, strangely untouched despite all this action. Rubbery flat tiles are all that are left in the zone that once was full of topography. One dancer folds their body up gingerly on this mini stage. Slowly, the others fold in as well, piling up and squishing themselves down like the plastic they condensed before. Their movements are gentle but not hesitant–they pour all their weight into each other eventually. As of yet these three have been silent, but now, skin on skin, and with H disappeared, they produce soft noises, whimpers that push out of them with a tonal exhale when compressed, like a tired, well-loved squeaky toy. Another Moten question comes to mind: “What am I, the object?”[4]

A thump from above. 

This sound, as if knocking from outside, reminds me of what we’ve been immersed in. The dance began within an acknowledgment. The dance began from the inside and in the middle of an attempt to name the stolen Lenape land we were on or of, and to name the enslaved labor that built the walls, columns, floors we were held in.[5] The dance, burrowing in and out of the ground, muddies the finality of this fraught practice of stating the violence that is always already there, here. Because how could such an event possibly end? Or, as Moten might put it, “What is the edge of this event?”[6]

All these objects, manipulated, removed and remade, conjure images of rubble and tunnels, and humans emerging and humans embracing. Red socks like an afterglow of the red keffiyeh. These sounds, textures, actions, and echoes that Zins-Browne deploys to denote the temporal ongoingness of struggle, also, whether intentionally or not, speak to me of the spatial expansiveness of resistance, of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. “What is the edge of this event?”[7]

The large immobile downstage lump finally comes alive (no object remains untransformed, it seems). One more human emerges, as if to respond to the chorus of action that has been building for nearly an hour. This person wears heavy laced boots, distinguished from the rest of the performers in socks. I never see their face. They gather their coverings efficiently, depositing them amongst the other bundles, and stomp out of the sanctuary, up the stairs. Their movements provide a fast-forwarded summary of the dance, a marker of the end of some cycle, the beginning of another. The rest of the dancers slowly give up on the project of folding themselves flat into ground, and exit the sanctuary one at a time. 

Exits do not denote an end though. Because they are all above us now, stomping passionately on the rickety wood floors of the balcony, the spot of St. Mark’s Church that seems to invoke the past most saliently—it is rumored that this is the place where enslaved people once watched services. Red light fills the apses above. Columns, shaking. Walls, shaking. Taut tarp, released, falling. Stomping, or maybe skipping? Neither happy nor tragic, sound and movement build with a kind of celebratory, anxious urgency.

With “happy” and “tragic,” I cite Moten, again. These words appear in the opening essay of In the Break, which is titled, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream.” It is a kind of lyrical analysis of Frederic Douglass’ description of the sounds that inaugurated him into subjection and subjectivity: his Aunt Hester’s screams as she was beaten and the unintelligible singing of enslaved peoples in the woods. Moten joins Saidiya Hartman in questioning the politics and ramifications of reproducing violence through its reiteration. But Moten questions the possibility (and ultimately insists on the impossibility) of avoiding such a reproduction, of putting to bed the brutality that has overwhelmingly defined the Black experience in this country. He identifies Douglass’ description as part of a particular Black radical tradition: “a tradition of devotion both to the happy and the tragic possibilities embedded in passionate utterance and response.”[8] A tradition that extends to 20th century free jazz, specifically Abbey Lincoln’s vocals in Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace–a site where the scream returns again, where “shriek turns speech turns song.”[9] Perhaps something like H’s croak turned hum turned melody. 

Is performance, then, inevitably and complexly reproductive? Always somehow recalling pain while also making something anew? This might be the zone of “improvisational immanence,” a phrase that feels paradoxical and vexing but also amazingly descriptive for the re-making and re-questioning of something always already there.[10] By invoking the immanent, the concept that there is no outside, Moten reminds me that performance can hold it all. It can, in fact, demonstrate how burying and tucking-in are connected; it can, in fact, occur in the midst of (and as?) an acknowledgment of brutal history. 

These dancers are subsisting in the subterranean and unearthing the underground, reconstituting zones of loss. duel    H is improvising into the uncertain edges of that which is always already there, which is to say, the coextensivity of body and land, the devastating originary scream, and the ground. The ground, imbued with past and ready to be turned to and turned over. 

Time keeps collapsing. As I read In the Break, I find myself clutching the pencil like I clutched the flashlight. A day later, in the street, I find myself gripping onto a waterlogged cardboard sign that reads, “no one is free until we are all free.” This gesture, this grasp, charged with gratitude and grief and matters of accountability, keeps posing the question: How am I a witness, a participant?

Are they stomping to kick something up? 

The lights cut out again–in the middle of this seemingly important sounding. The vibrations of footfalls from above hit me like another land acknowledgment. This time though, plunged into darkness, the audience makes no moves to flick on their little beams of light. Perhaps we can practice, in this darkness, how to be with the fullness yet always-not-enough-ness of such a ceremony. 

All images: Andros Zins-Browne’s duel     H at Danspace Project, 2024. Photo: Elyssa Goodman.

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[1]  Akademie der Künste der Welt, “ON VIOLENCE #2 Stefano Harney & Fred Moten / Online Lecture,” YouTube Video, 53:31, June 8, 2022, https://youtu.be/3I_1QAdnjic

[2] Nora Raine Thompson, “VESSEL: Seeing Double,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2022, https://brooklynrail.org/2022/11/dance/VESSEL-Seeing-Double.

[3] Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4.

[4] Moten “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 22

[5]  Danspace Project’s land and site acknowledgment

[6] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 22

[7] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 22

[8] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 21.

[9] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 22. 

[10] Moten, Notes for “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,”in In the Break, 255