TSLS is currently a 2023 Curator-in-Residence as part of Links Hall's Co-Mission Curatorial Residency Program Take Some Leave Some is a multidisciplinary, performance collective that uses original sound, choreography, film, and installations to create experiences reflecting and celebrating Black women in our lives—their labor, courage, and wisdom even in their imperfections. Collaborators Keyierra Collins, Brianna Alexis Heath, and Jovan Landry intentionally create experiences inside homes and neighborhood spaces on the Southside of Chicago to reference “home” as a kind of safe space, a place for community where Black women learn foundational lessons, and are taught to be resilient and unapologetic. Take Some Leave Some Collaborators
TSLS Photo ArchiveCredit: Jovan Landry TSLS Video Archive"The Procession" (September 2022)
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It's quite hard to put into words what I experienced as a participant of danceGATHERING--an anti disciplinary festival that gathers artists, thinkers, and creatives of all kinds in Lagos, Nigeria for two weeks. I traveled to Lagos both in 2018 and 2019 to devise, experiment, question, and vulnerable with a group of artists I had never met before. Fully willing to let get washed up in the tides and float. Even with various opportunities I had to write about my experience, the words never came. And, when my friends and family asked what the experience was like, I would always let out a long sign, let my back sink into whatever chair I was sitting in, watch my eyes float toward the ground, and then look up with a laugh and innocent grin, "I don't really know." You just have to be there. You just have to go. You just have to see for yourself. Part of me felt guilty for not being able to describe my experience at one time. Now, I feel liberated. Like I'm holding on to a secret. A treasure that I don't have to give to anyone else, but that I share with the people who were there with me. The people I now call "family." When I came back to Chicago in 2018, I could only write these stream-of-consciousness, onomatopoeia, chant-like, verses and describe visions I had while participating in workshops or performing on Broad Street. There was no coherent, straight, academic, account of Lagos. Partially because I was dealing with heavy emotions of having fallen in love, and partially because the words weren't coming that way. It was like another language that I had never known. I had never been able to utter. And it frustrated the hell out of me. Even now, as I write this quarantined in my childhood bedroom in Atlanta, Georgia, during a global pandemic, I am not able to fully express those experiences. But, like I said I'm okay with that. Somethings are just for me to remember. Somethings are just for remembering when you need them. But, if you're like me, nosy and curious as hell, then I've shared personal photos and lines from several journal entries and attempted, full-length pieces I wrote before and after Lagos in 2018. But, to get a better sense of the purpose of dG, the people behind it, etc. visit www.qdancecenter.com and follow @dancegathering on the socials. I
welcome. We started with small hums and sounds to warm up the vocal cords. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, ehhhhhhhhhh, ehhhhh ahhhhhhh, ooo, eeeee. Going from high to low registers. Open and closed vowels. She asked us to let our voices expire with the breath, and consider our inhale as sound, let it become and mix with time. “Consider how your body responds to this sound?” Do I want to walk back and forth? Am I urged to go to the ground? Am I prompted to run around and stop mid stride? Does my head fall back with chest splayed open? Where are my arms? She prompted us to embrase release in our bodies, let our voices reach. “Let go, but be present,” she said. Let it take you, but come back. We need you here. II moanin’. I close my eyes. Take a breath and settle into my body. I feel like I’ve been running for a long time. Finally back home to grab a nice tall glass of ice cold water. I take a breath, drop my shoulders, release my jaw, and let my head fall back slightly. Feet planted, toes spread out reaching like webs. I feel a warm sensation building in my abdomen. I bend my knees, let my pelvis hang within muscle and skin. I turn my palms upward. float. There, in a posture of surrender, I began o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o zuhhhh-ahh a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a azuhhh-ahh ahh ahh ahh ahh ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah a h h h h h. And then she entered my heart, grandma Reatha. I’ve carried her in my heart since may of last year. I don’t remember her. she held me in her arms when I was two months old. deceased in 99. I was two years old. I’ve always had her picture with me, but one day I noticed her and kept looking at the picture and felt immense gratitude because I knew she prayed for me. I felt the weight of that prayer. I felt the weight of love. I felt the weight of waiting and intercession. I felt the weight of “keep on keepin’ on.” I felt the weight of displacement. I felt the weight of joy. So I cried for her. The warm sensation in my abdomen increased, and I wept. eh hhh hhhh h h h h h a Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy ya Ya-zuh- ahhhhhhh Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy ya Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya Walking forward and back with small steps I wept. III benediction. The blockades are broken down. Remnants of our dance are left for others to decipher, pick up, claim, or leave behind. Packing seems like a labor of love, but I am opened to new possibilities and the challenge to “try not to forget.” I try to be courageous, as I ride away in my Uber. I left Nigeria feeling like I missed something. Feeling like I left something behind. Did I leave something? I have my charger, passport, ID, notebook. Take the uber. Go home. SAFE SPACE Artists, Alivia Blade and Bri Heath, were roommates their first year at Columbia College Chicago in the fall of 2015. They were both new to the city, and packed their questions along with their favorite momentos from home. As they were getting to know each other, they discovered that they had similar experiences. They were both from the South, grew up in middle class families, and were taught the staunch admonition of God. They both knew the isolation and fear that comes with being voiceless--that comes with not being able to ask questions. They both knew what it meant to question oneself and being convinced not love oneself outside of society's expectations. When they met each other, they found understanding and formed a sisterhood built on affirmation, listening, and unconditional love. With the formation of SAFE SPACE in their second semester at Columbia, Liv and Bri felt moved to tell their stories with others in hopes of hearing other stories and widening the conversation on what blackness--particularly black girlhood--looks like. After a full semester and summer of writing and documenting their stories, they began development for a collaborative project--a book that included old journal entries, childhood photographs, poetry, notated choreography, and experimental photography that expressed their feelings and experiences as black girls. On the topic about what this book means to them, Alivia and Bri said: "We feel this book is an exploration of all of the times we were ever told to exist outside of how God sees us, and how we internalized those expectations. This process has shown us that we are not alone, and that we are not confined to how the world may perceive us. We are excited to share this exploration with other people in hopes of hearing others' stories and experiences."
The ladies' photography has garnered support from peers and mentors alike as it was selected for the Hokin Honors Exhibition at Columbia College Chicago--a prestigious art exhibition at the school showcasing design, photography, and visual art work (among other mediums) from Columbia students. Their book is set to be released in Fall 2017 and will be the first edition in what they hope to be a longer project of collecting stories of black girls and boys everywhere. For the past eight months, I have been researching and experimenting with discourses of sexuality in the black church experience and black girlhood. Pulling from personal narrative, black literature, womanist theology and black dance studies, I created the short dance film, beautiful., as a culminating project for this study. Although my research is a kind of open-ended space (touching a lot of spaces and research points), this film specifically studies the body as a space for memory—all experience. I am interested in the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition and the ways that Africanist aesthetics and traditions have survived the transatlantic slave trade within the practices of the ring shout and gospel music, and how power is disseminated between men and women in the church which is highly reminiscent of the matriarchal power structures in West African traditions.
However, I am also interested in the way these traditions operate within the American context. This brings up politics of respectability that often permeate black religious spaces, enacting strict gender roles, and unhealthy realities about the body. This split between the sacred and secular is a purely Western ideology and acts as an attack against black sexuality in means of keeping blackness under a constant microscope, surveillance, control, especially black female, gay, queer, and trans bodies. This study is also interested in the tense orgasmic space where the sacred and secular collide which can actually be seen in the black sanctified church, but many church leaders and members often deny its origins and its power. I have also been inspired by one of the culminating scenes in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in which Shug Avery, a black queer woman, is drawn back to her Father’s house from the backwoods speakeasy by the choir’s singing. The organ from the churchhouse and the trumpet from the club mix as Shug embraces her father exclaiming in tears, “See, daddy sinners have soul, too.” The embrace of Shug and her father represents a kind of orgasmic release as both the sacred and secular collide. But, neither of these spaces are separate, unrelated entities, but parts of a whole history of embodied practices of resistance for black people in America. This is the third iteration of my performance series "beautiful." which explores the historical complexity of black Holiness-Pentecostal (the Sanctified Church) worship traditions in the US. I am particularly interested in the performance of gender in black worship settings--examining how African American women's voices and stories act as matriarch, healer, teacher and surrogate in the Black church. I use black feminist studies, womanist theology, and performance studies as frameworks for this study.
CLICK TO WATCH VIDEO BELOW! Let me Baptize you in the tides Indulge Come clean. Sink deep in the sticky, Sinners have Soul, too. This work is a part of a year long research process between my best friend and artistic collaborator, Alivia Blade, and I. In summer 2017, we revisited the spaces and places of our past: visiting each other's childhood homes, going back to our old elementary, middle and high schools, going through family pictures, old toys, and trinkets from our childhood. We wanted to give our younger selves space to tell their stories, and create a space for other black girls to share their stories as well. Our hope is that this exploration will continue as an oral history project--recording and collecting family stories and rituals, particularly those of the female family members, into a book. The installation was a part of Student Performance Night at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, November 16 and 17th, 2017.
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AuthorBrianna Alexis Heath is a dancer, writer, and arts administrator living in Atlanta, GA. ArchivesCategories |