Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls: What Remains (NYC Premiere)
**NOTE: All 4 performances of What Remains are now sold out. A wait list will begin at the door each night at 7:15pm.**
Co-presented by Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) as part of the Crossing The Line Festival.
*Please arrive on time! There is no late seating for this performance!*
What Remains is a collaboration between poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine and choreographer Will Rawls (recipient of the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer).
Through movement and language What Remains invites us across the threshold of a historical void, creating an immersive environment from the idea of an entombed imagination, and responding to violence and disappearance with a resonant, ghostly chorus.
“One thing about being black in America—you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life,” says Rankine to the New York Times. “So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night?…Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”
Adds Rawls, “One never just happens to be black, even in the most abstract dance…Whiteness in our society — and this is something Claudia talks about, too — is the space that produces the conditions and terms against which all other lives are measured and enabled or disabled. Dance doesn’t escape those power dynamics.”
The performance on Tuesday, Sept 25 will be followed by a discussion with Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls, moderated by Malik Gaines.
Direction and choreography by Will Rawls
Text by Claudia Rankine
Creative Consultant John Lucas
Production design by David Szlasa
Costume design by Eleanor O’Connell
Sound Design by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Music by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, with Will Rawls
Created in collaboration with and performed by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis
Crossing The Line is an annual international arts festival for New York City produced by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with leading cultural institutions. France has a long history of supporting national and international cultural practices, welcoming and nurturing new ideas and influential perspectives from around the world. FIAF, as the leading French cultural institution in the US, critically maintains that practice through the Crossing The Line Festival, presenting leading-edge artists from France and the US alongside their peers from around the world. Since its inauguration in 2007, Crossing the Line has cultivated an increasingly large and diverse following, and received numerous accolades in the press including “Best of” in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Artforum, and Frieze. Festival performances have earned multiple Obie and Bessie awards. crossingthelinefestival.org
"What Remains" was commissioned, developed, and premiered by Live Arts Bard, the commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. What Remains was developed with additional commissioning support from the French Institute Alliance Française’s (FIAF) Crossing the Line Festival, the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University, Yale Repertory Theater, and SummerStages at the ICA/Boston.