Black Duration: Sounding A Fugitivity In Process

Caption: *A polyphonic gestural composition. This infographic I designed and shared through social media unites the sonic, temporal, gestural, and cyber aspects of THINAH. The three performers occupy distinct comedic registers (similar to the comedic dynamic of the Marx Brothers) and the physical stage space they occupy can be likened to Western musical arrangement and notation. In the accompanying video, filmed on my phone, we see the performers improvising in a set piece largely shaped by sound–Geng PTP directed the music for this particular section of the work. In this video, we see Nile (dressed in white) joined by Barney painted white who crosses in front of him onstage littering red hats then perching herself high on a ladder ironically screaming “White power!” as Malcolm dances in the behind them. Malcolm’s space is the background, he’s the timekeeper, the grieving beating heart, costumed and dancing in MSCHF ‘big red boots’, setting the metronome to black virality. Malcolm is the only performer to ever mention Trevor by name, asking Nile at the last night of the show’s second run: “what’s your favorite memory of Trevor?” Nile stoically ignores him while Crackhead Barney flashes the crowd. *

The project of eluding capture is present in the dialogue not only in its improvised variability but also in its syntax. Language and speaking becomes vocalizing, full of non sequitur, idiosyncratic babble that aims to slip the grip of fixed meaning. The performers's voices are digitally warped by use of receiver amp and headset as well as audio manipulations and a soundtrack supervised by Geng PTP and Slowdanger which cause words to echo, garble, and distort. Sentences are uttered in a way that pushes the boundaries of intelligibility, where words are stretched through singing, screaming, chanting enhanced by live digital rendering and mixing. A melismatic approach to dialogue where words are distorted through extension, creating a multiplicity of meanings and avoiding one fixed syllable, avoiding one fixed meaning.

Harris explains:
“I’m always using text and language and voice as materiality inside of the work, that as much as I’m trying to communicate something with my language, the affect of how I’m communicating it is also a part of the syntactical impression of what I’m doing through modulating my voice analog-ly, I’m always sing song-ing, always chanting on top of the digital distortion from my sound collaborators, it allows it to be like word soup in a sense that it’s a canvas or a field of text and texture that you can glean in and out of meaning … This is my attempt to use language subjectively or affectively creating a field of textures that allows the audience to have a more porous experience of meaning or nonmeaning which is an important politic inside of the work of black nonsense, black dada…a fugitive non meaning. We’re running around the stage not saying anything too substantive but it’s how we’re saying it that is more important than what.”(8)

The digitality of language in THINAH is not limited to how performers speak but often define the content of their speech. There is a cyber awareness that guides the sonic environment of THINAH where speaking or vocalizing is full of cyber/ social media parlance and up to the minute pop cultural references; in fugitive syntactical structures that share a similar feeling and rhythmic flow of memes and shitposting. Shitposting is a style of social media meaning-making involving the pastiche of widely circulated graphics with current pop cultural references that are mixed and framed with irony and often with political urgency, where language slips into texture and meaning is spontaneous and contextual.(9) For instance, in Harris’s opening monologue he repeats a series of quips that have the same feeling of shitposts in their humor and urgency: “haters gonna hate, white dick gonna penetrate”/ “I’m white. it’s like the one drop rule but in reverse”/ “In the theatre, there are no mistakes” / “I’m smiling but you just can’t see it.”

Understanding in the Dark

minor b, Harris’s second full length performance premiered at The Shed during their Open Call program for mid-career artists. The production took place in a black box theatre and employed a dimensional show-within-a-show style where Harris spends most of the time as a kind of stage manager, often breaking the fourth wall for comedic effect. This production can be thought of as a reaction to THINAH, it’s the anxiety and panic that comes after a huge success. This work is a play featuring performances by Harris with Jim Fletcher, Tony Jenkins, Ley (sis), Jonah Rollins, and with music by Kwami Winfield. The play is musically inspired by the life of musician Buddy Bolden and is about the complicated romantic relationship between an artist and a fictitious Shed board member played by Jim Fletcher.(10) minor b takes the distorted vocalizing word soup of THINAH and, abstracting it one step further, distills it into a sonic dissonance most akin to harsh noise music. If THINAH is a loud, dynamic, primary colored extravaganza, minor b is the tonal underside of this, employing a fugitive aesthetic that is more subtle and dimensional, not only in the sonic choices, but most notably in a set design and narrative that takes place in darkness.

The “minor” quality in minor b is the opposite or foil of the ‘major’; it explores the underside of conventional legibility. I often compare legibility and understanding to literal brightness, meaning, to be visually seen is to be understood. To be lit brighter is to be more conventionally, and easily understood (visually, certainly racially too). In a hypothetical analogy where legibility and illegibility were controlled by light switches, we might say: the major can be seen as the ON switch, the minor is the OFF switch. Conversely, if whiteness is the ON switch, then blackness is the OFF switch and , if melody is the ON switch, then harmony is the OFF switch. If conventionality is the ON switch, then unconventionality is the OFF switch, and, if presence is the ON switch, then absence is the OFF switch, and so on… In minor b, Harris dims the lights. This production revels in the liminality of the image negative, the comfort of sonic dissonance, and finds meaning and community in darkness. Beyond the institutional critique and capitalist refusal, minor b is really about finding meaning and understanding in the illegible obscurity of blackness. To create networks of care, and to hold each other in the dark.

Evading Capture x Redeeming Care

Liberation is a state that we can sometimes only ever gesture into being. Black duration is a process of shaping sound and time through these gestures. Black durational gestures are present in THINAH and minor b in two specific moments. In both moments, the pacing, sound and lightning are out of time with the rest of the production. These two processions, as I’m calling them, become the defining performance of each production.

The procession in THINAH is the climactic moment which comes when Malcolm X Betts dances towards the erected bounce house which is understood as a mausoleum. Betts enters from the back of the house in a stream of light and dances down the aisle towards the stage. Betts’s presence is heralded by a screaming Crackhead Barney spinning atop a platform in the audience–her vocalizing is unintelligible but dirge-like in tone. This is a dance towards death, he is approaching doom. Betts dances hesitantly and slowly forward towards the stage in movements that are energetic yet full of knowing. When he finally makes it to the stage he picks up a receiver mic and headset and begins to vocalize making jokes with words that sonically collapse into themselves as the walls of this house collapse on top of him. He heroically survives the implosion and is joined by Harris and Barney onstage.

Caption: a procession along the Y axis– a vertical line from the back of house to up to the stage. Betts performs the ultimate fugitive act in THINAH. The lighting and pace changes to highlight the importance of this gesture, an act of black duration which symbolizes Harris's “fantasy of eluding capture” come to fruition. It’s significant to note here that the music that was distorted and scrambled by Geng PTP in this scene is the song “Home” from The Wiz. (11)

The procession in minor b is a moment of connection and intimacy between the artist character, this time, played by Harris and Jim Fletcher’s board member. This is a love scene. Fletcher is shirtless with a handheld receiver amp and mic slowly slithering his way across the floor. Fletcher’s breathing and moans, amplified by the mic, are distorted and elongated, filling the room. Harris sits behind him and responds to him with a synth creating a noise duet as the couple embrace each other in sonic dissonance. This scene feels out of place with the rest of the production not only in duration, but also in lighting. In a work that is otherwise plunged into an unsettling darkness, during this scene, the stage and house lights are turned up to cast the pair in the light of understanding (as if to allude that–returning to my lightswitch analogy– the lights turned ON makes this procession a moment of understanding between the two characters). It is a brief tender moment of intimacy and care in a dark production otherwise haunted by missed opportunities, perversion, professional dissatisfaction, and romantic ambiguity.

Caption: *procession along the X axis–moving horizontally from stage right to stage left. This scene is the only true moment of intimacy between the couple, their bodies wrapped together in noise; a motionless instant of connection which is gesturally stretched, their grunts and sighs made sonically melismatic. Intimacy and affection become a dissonant sonic hold. *

The out of place-ness and the pacing of these two processions are moments of magic and examples of black duration. These processions move vertically and horizontally, spiritually intersecting as if to answer each procession's gesture. Evading capture and alchemizing it into a fugitive yet redeeming moment of intimacy unite THINAH and minor b, sounding a hopeful call and response.