Jerome Ellis’ multimedia video-poem life on life was streamed the 29th of September 2020 as part of CAAPP’s “Looking for Language in the Ruins” roundtable featuring poet Erica Hunt and scholar/critical-fabulator Saidiya Hartman. Ellis is an Afro-Carribean stutterer, composer, and performer. His piece is a collaboration with disabled choreographer Alice Shepperd, and names a critical articulation between life-states superposed: life on life. As we explore the mobilization of breath via the medium of the body in Ellis and Sheppherd’s piece, let us mark here the suggestion of an other, possible mode of living, in excess of (“on”) the ‘life’ that is misdistributed by the State. What kind of movement, Ellis and Shepperd seem to be asking, is possible in the ruined afterlives of slavery?

In the talkback portion of “Looking for Language in the Ruins,” Saidiya Hartman proposes that in language, the terms of political legibility are laid, and that we cannot think outside of them. In particular, she means that the terms of language in the archive of slavery “[contain] the language that lays black life to ruin” (Hunt, talkback). It is within this risk that Ellis’ divinely sung refrain, “stoppage, thence passage, thence stoppage” makes its presencing known. This presentation explores the formal investigations in openings and closings in life on life. I’ll take two exploratory routes today: first we will observe what Ellis does to the fugitive ads he sings with. Then, we’ll change gears to observe the work of dance/dancing, and we’ll try to read both in relation to the political possibilities of the stutter in so far as it affords Ellis a kind of temporal re-orientation vis a vis the ruinous language of the archive.

At the top of the talk-back, Ellis shares his interest in researching ‘moments of silence,’ in which we typically honor the passing of the dead. He offers for us to take his stutter as an opportunity to collect our thoughts toward the dead, toward the ancestors, in such a way that the stutter becomes an opening, a pause in which we might orient ourselves otherwise, and, as we’ll see, might occupy the archives otherwise too.

 

 

Re-reading or rather re-singing a 1777 fugitive ad, Ellis selectively reddens the original text, and the new poem is painfully extracted or seared out from the ad. He locates himself by re-voicing the named “JONATHAN,” marked as having a speech impediment, through his singing voice: “he has a black crab in his speech.” This bleeding of the text through song renders what we might call a practice of making language from the ruins of slavery’s archive. Indeed, song serves the litany Ellis performs to his stuttering ancestor, affording him a divine status: “the crab secures proof of being above.” Practices of re-reading are crucial for Erica Hunt notably, who articulates Ellis’ work as a subversion of how black bodies are taught to read themselves in the historical record, toward what she calls transmutation—into something “they had never imagined we would see ourselves as.”  I want to take a brief moment here to locate Ellis’ practice within a broader “archival turn” in performance, which according to performance scholar and practitioner Kate Elswit positions the artist in a hybrid role of curator and interlocutor of archival materials (in this case, the ruins of slave-catching practices, which we know to be closely related to early formations of the police in this country). Ellis’ song is a technique of activation of these ruins: he derives from his interaction with them a kind of theory of the stutter: “the stutter is reward, the stutter is the passage, the high chariot, the stutter is a house for speech, the stutter is the horse, the stutter has run away from any government.” Thus, the stutter, tethered in the fugitive ads to scars marking the body, becomes on top of this a force for disarticulating topos, that is, it opens passage, it is the horse of the runaway, which slips into being the house. Both terms dangerously harken to disciplinary technologies of the plantation: the “big house” and the slave-catchers’ horses and hounds. What is key here is that the stutter is imbued with risk, like a resonating room for historical violence, just as it is also able, for Ellis, to wrench a divine language of survival from the ruins.

For Ellis, reading otherwise allows the interrogation of two gestural paths: a retrieval of a double genealogy (slaves and stutterers) and a capacity to read otherwise. Both are animated by the key turn of fugitivity, which we know to be performative, if we recall with Ashon Crawley “the necessity of the breath in recounting movements, of breathing itself, as performative act, as performative gesture,” that is, that “breathing air is constitutive for flight, for movement, for performance.” (33) I want to switch gears here, to drag our focus more explicitly on to Alice Shepperd, who has been dancing this whole time. Elswit writes: “Breath is fundamental to us as dancers and people, and yet itself is curious – assumed and automatic but unpredictable in the ways it shifts through so many dimensions of lived experience and slips between conscious and unconscious realms.” (340) The ability of breath to pass between conscious and unconscious states, to warp and to weft unwieldy affective networks, gives us an inkling into the possibilities of its experimentation. What is notable in life on life is that we do not hear the dancer’s diegetic breathing (or any sound) at all. In this sense, it is instead Ellis’ singing voice (and later the saxophone) who live out an embodiment in juxtaposition with Shepperd’s silent motions.

Shepperd dances in a precarious hold, superposed onto a scene she cannot take part in, positioned as if at the plantation’s edge. The box sits atop, or on this other scene. It is Hartman who goes on to articulate the obvious (if obviously difficult): there is, in fact, something that is made here. Histories of the use of dance on the plantation, it is worth mentioning, are deeply troubling—though they evidence what we know to be the disciplinary underpinnings of choreographing, or choreopolicing (see Lepecki). Dance was both a tool of discipline and a tool for kinds of liberation, as witnessed in many 18th and 19th Century accounts, in which white observes routinely expressed their shock that these exhausted laboring bodies could find the energy to dance endlessly in the cover of night. These dance scenes, often occurring in maroon zones between plantations, were also often the site of collective plotting, be it to overthrow masters or to escape, amidst rich developments in musical and spiritual practices (see Entiope). Ellis’ video-piece seems to be staging the archive’s limitations in the form of the container for the dance, whilst showing that life, or at least dancing nonetheless occurs. Here the constant theoretical slippages between life, breath, and dance make themselves painfully felt. To adjust breath to the medium of dance a little more: “It is true that one “sees” dancing, but it is also true that one “listens,” and even more profoundly, one “senses” dancing (because one “touches” or “experiences” the movement: the reflexivity of the body is total). There is no single visual or kinesthetic image of the dancing body, but a multiplicity of virtual images produced by movements that mark so many points of contemplation from which the body perceives itself.” (Gil 24) Dancing affords a kind of de-multiplication of the dancing subject, constantly articulating an interior space of movement with an exterior scene of movement. It is fair to say that the dancer’s breath is at least one of the techniques (alongside skin, shape, tension, and others) by which the world is mediated. Here, Shepperd is experimenting with the psychic (and real) space of the hold, in the manner of Henry Box Brown, an enslaved person transported inside a box of 2 by 3 by 3 feet.

Lifting ruined words via his “black crab”, Ellis’ song slips soon into vocalizing, with a perfect montage accompanying the arching of Shepperd’s back. Following Elswit and Gil, I have insisted that dance shores up the fourth dimension in the aesthetic experience of the work, even—perhaps especially—across video. Following Nell Andrew, I want to suggest that the medium is in fact the muscle, here, and it is the odd propensity of dance, since it left the ballet and forayed into Modernism, to be thought of as ‘translating the idea’ of aesthetic forms, or what Kuppers in a contemporary, disability and ecologically focused context discusses as the “base structure that translates across the screen, when I watch, and when I co-breathe” (18). Video-dance in this sense allows Ellis and Shepperd to become what Kuppers calls “memory machines” whilst also experimenting “points of approach” (18) to the ruins of slavery through their voice and movement respectively.

In the hold, Shepperd reminds me of Kuppers’ amoeba. Dance outside of academic forms seems always to presage the decline or undoing of Apollonian forms. Here the box is a break in the image, a pocket, a hold within which dance can happen, though it may not look immediately like a dance, since it is so antithetical to see dance contained. We might remix Hartman’s question here: how to make dance outside of the affordance of political legibility? In the hold?

 

The block image of the fugitive ad soon overwrites/overrides the dancer, leaving only an opening, in the bottom-left corner (marked “northward” into the vastness of the forest, terrain of the maroons). Though Hartman warns us of the pitfalls of inadvertently re-animating something when you re-iterate it, she also argues elsewhere for a use of the archive for contrary purposes. She herself contributes forcefully to this idea by offering a reversal: in her piece, Crow Jane reverses the order of Jim Crow and his gender too. Dance’s potential seems to be to constantly flirt with this kind of subversive reversal in the names of figure and ground. The expansiveness of the forest here is a conscious act of framing, I’d say, one which prompts us to return to Hartman and Moten’s question, via Ellis: “what does it mean to find an outside inside?”

life on life is a prayer to fugitivity and a litany for the stutter. In it, the stutter takes form as a practice of reading, as a tool for finding song in archival ruins. The stutter, because it opens a moment of mourning, temporally re-orients us in the direction of fugitive ancestors. Complexifying the relation between voice, speech, and the body, life on life forces us to call to mind those fugitives (who may have been disabled) whose moves were contained, policed, conditioned, or hunted and foregrounds the reversals they constantly threatened to perform by escaping. The dancing body in the hold, sublimated by saxophone—which is acousmatically shown throughout the piece, hanging from a tree “as if in flight” (Hunt)—activates endless points of contemplation, openings and closings, from which to re-read fugitivity as a life force from within the archive.

 

REFERENCES

“Looking for Language in the Ruins,” JJJJJerome Ellis, Erica Hunt, Saidiya Hartman. Centre for African American Poetry and Poetics, September 29th 2020. Accessed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bSu_ysGzVQ

Andrew, Nell. “Introduction: The Medium is a Muscle” in Moving Modernism: The move to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema. (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Crawley, Ashon. “Breath,” from Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2017)

Kuppers, Petra: “Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays: Speculative Embodiment,” from Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Encounters (2021)

Elswitt, Kate “A Living Cabinet of Breath Curiosities” in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Vol 15, no.3 pp 340-359 (2019)

Entiope, Gabriel. Negres, Danse et Resistance : La Caraibe du XVIIe au XIXe Siecle (Editions de L’Harmattan, 1996)

Gil, Jose (trans. Lepecki). “The Paradoxical Body” in The Drama Review, Vol. 50, no. 4, pp 21-35 (Winter 2006)

Lepecki, Andre. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer” in The Drama Review, Vol. 57, no. 4, pp- (Winter 2013)