New life, new steps

New life, new steps

When I first heard the music coming from upstairs as the Wideman-Davis Dance Company began their first rehearsal in the house, I was taken aback.  It was the first sign of life at Klein in many decades.  The closed house was to be shaken open by their performance of Migratuse Ataraxia.

Designed by the choreographers to be experiential, the dance’s aim is to shift the rules of representation in this domestic space.  It employs movement, technology, visual installations, and a communal meal and moderated discussion to memorialize the lives of enslaved individuals, in this world premiere at Klein.  Migratuse refers to the departed or to having been changed and Ataraxia to calmness or emotional tranquility. The performers lead audience members from room to room presenting vignettes that reinterpret the traditional white narratives and present black narratives that also took place there

The dance causes viewers to confront the inner lives of enslaved people… imagining how they might have lived, loved, and experienced emotion.  In the opening monologue, the narrator states, after reading from the Alabama Slave Codes, “in this romanticized  place of southern  white fantasy… we are migrating from the periphery to the center.” Then the dancers enter into the interior rooms of the house.

Time travel occurred:  projected video on several walls and a ceiling (of a man running through a field; cotton fields; our family cemetery) engulfed the dancers and performance artist.  Usually the performers portrayed enslaved people; other times they were clearly enacting the present.  This left me thinking about the reproduction of plantation life today and how we want to do whatever we can through Klein Arts & Culture to stop that. 

I was concerned with my relationship to the house today and what the peeling walls, creaky floors, projections, installation, the wails of grief by the performance artist, and expressive choreography and dance meant at that moment.  It was emotional; it was a break from the past; it called for a different future; it was overwhelming.  It will take me a while to process this. 

I want us all to think about our next steps as informed by Migratuse Ataraxia.  What will they be?

—Nell Gottlieb