MANCC Welcomes Visiting Artist Will Rawls
Photo courtesy of Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Photo taken by Brian Rogers.
[siccer]
September 8 – 20, 2019
Film Screening on Wed., Sept. 18 @ 5:30pm at the Black Box Studio in Montgomery Hall.
Photo by Luis Rodriguez
The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography is thrilled to welcome Will Rawls into residency for the first time from September 8-20, 2019. Will Rawls will come to MANCC for the first time to further the development of [siccer]. Building from the editorial term for a misspelled word, “[sic]”, [siccer] is a dance and film project challenging widespread circulation and representation of black bodies through quotation, memes and photos. An interdisciplinary artist, Rawls uses [siccer] to consider the history of images surrounding black bodies-in-action, the relation of photography and film to fantasies of truth and the appropriation of language across social groups. Simultaneously, he explores the restlessness of gesture and language as strategies of black performance that question the certainty of reproduction and citation. [siccer] cultivates elusiveness and abstraction to resist the “racial gristmill” of mass, social media.
The film portion of [siccer] uses stop-motion film techniques—a meticulous process of photographing objects or people as they incrementally execute poses, gestures and scenarios. After hundreds of photographs are taken, they are then sequenced to produce a likeness to bio-mechanical motion. In this collection of moving images, Rawls questions the labor of bodies at the moment they are captured on camera, and what happens beyond the frame of the camera lens.
Rawls’s collaborators range from choreographers and designers to composers and performers, including New York-based dance artist Katrina Reid who earned her M.A. in American Dance Studies from the School of Dance at FSU in 2011.
Following an intensive film-making residency in Los Angeles, Rawls and his collaborative team will focus their time at MANCC on development of the movement and language portions of the work. They will be joined by Kemi Adeyemi, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, who leads the Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator and public lecture series rooted in expansive and dynamic investigations of blackness in contemporary art.
Support for Adeyemi’s time at MANCC is provided, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
