Grant Recipient
Jimmy Joyner
Project Support – Dance Performance & Public Art
Investigating queerness and my desire to explore and share alternate ways of being with each other are the engines for my practices. How do I find new ways of being with others? I have to find new ways of being with myself. The connection I seek to have with myself and others is one of chance and mystery, of trust and support, and freedom. How can I allow myself to be and search when at the moment I speak it out into the world it puts a stamp on the idea, halting its birth and potential?
My work encompasses, but is not limited to embroidery, creature making, textile dying, storytelling, installation building, costume construction, music making and dance. I cultivate practices that are living and breathing and support me where I am. If my practices are living and breathing they must, at points, die/transform.
What if there was a set of materials that are able to be organized and created with and then reused? What would be collected in the bodies’ of these materials? What would our shared bodies collect and then transfer through the reuse? - or “reuse as queer use” as Sara Ahmed has offered.
What would the “what elseness” of their collection be when gathered and activated? It might be something very mixed up and unrecognizable to the eye yet a feeling is felt and that feeling could be an instigator of change.
My movement is the house for the “Dream Body” to live in. A structure that allows. My swaying rhythmic hips and hidden face sculpt the energy of the space. I feel as though I am moving through darkness, like a marking of time until I can get out of spirit’s way so she can tell stories that are meant to be heard. The Dream Body creates the trajectory towards queerness, a space without a name, without explanation or understanding. Like pearl diving. An entry into deep unknowns and returning with wisdom and memory to take into the human experience. I am weeding through the past to heal myself from outdated systems. I am constantly on the edge of a body that lives in the future. So close that I could nearly touch the surface with the circling of my leg or the presence of a posture.
For spirit to manifest things cannot be set in stone. The temporality of these makings is what supports the manifestation of the unknown, or said in another way, temporality fuels the art to do what art has the potential to do.
“Choreography becomes a field for movement expression when the body becomes an intensive participant with the evolving milieu rather than simply the instigator of the action.” - Erin Manning
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