The Imminent Potentiality of Living Black Art
by jaamil olawale kosoko
…an artistic life is a practice. It is a way of seeing the world. It’s a way of thinking, of eating, of walking, of appreciating life that happens every day. – Helga Davis
In a cultural moment when time-based performance feels imperiled by live artists negotiating political, financial, and ecological crises, when the oldest University of the Arts in the United States closes without warning, and when American democracy as we know it teeters on the brink of collapse, what can the concert stage offer its community? Alone, the stage lacks active meaning or imagination, but when occupied with life, ideas, purpose, and creativity — what some know as ‘spirit’ — the stage transforms into a sanctuary for socio-political education, protest, and radical world-building.
The artists featured in this year’s Philly Fringe Festival grapple with, exemplify, deconstruct, and reimagine ‘spirit’ in ways that demand and reorganize our attention. In “Reading ‘Spirit’ and the Dancing Body in the Choreography of Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson,” an essay compiled in Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez’s influential volume Black Performance Theory, dance scholar Carl Paris considers the term “imminent potentiality” as a way to conceptualize how Black artists occupy, share, and transform space to envision beyond the colonialist frameworks of the concert stage, creating an “…imaginable interplay of artistic intention and enlivened spiritual expression.” The artists featured in this program — Helga Davis, Charlotte Brathwaite, Reggie Wilson, Trajal Harrell, among others — call us into a rigorous investigation of how we must hold, heal, and, with spirit, care for the land, each other, and ourselves while staying imaginative (civically, ethically, emotionally) in the critical labor of not only being human but humane.
POWER, a dance work by Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, conjures and deconstructs elements of spirit, staging what a Black Shaker worship practice could look like. Thinking and creating through what Wilson terms ‘African formalism,’ he combines Africanist and Western movement structures to create a modern interpolation of a Black Shaker ceremony. Having done extensive research within the Black Shaker traditions of Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871), a free queer Black woman who led a Shaker community in Philadelphia, Wilson’s work imbues religious and mystical qualities, infused with live a cappella arrangements that syllogize a rich choreographic tapestry combining field hollers, blues, gospel, and folk songs. The company’s name is taken from “fist and heel” worship styles—a historical reference paying homage to how enslaved Africans created music with their bodies in the absence of drums.
A world premiere within this year’s festival is an ensemble-devised work spearheaded by Helga Davis and Charlotte Brathwaite, titled We Have Gone As Far As We Can Together, which offers a poignant reflection on the nature of human connections and the limits of companionship. Inspired by the origin story of Thespis, known in Greek mythology as the ‘first’ actor, this production positions Helga Davis as the protagonist who takes that critical step forward to speak their truth as a means to consider the nature of individual and collective repair.
Trajal Harrell returns to FringeArts with The Köln Concert, alongside the Zürich Dance Ensemble, drawing inspiration from the music of Keith Jarrett’s iconic 1975 piano concert to create a performance that blends elements of postmodern dance, vogue, jazz, and classical forms. Harrell’s choreography delves into the interplay of music and movement, capturing the emotional depth and improvisational spirit of Jarrett’s work while creating a unique dialogue as if to time travel between the historical and contemporary moment.
By refusing extractive aesthetics of exploitation, by reminding us that liberation requires consistent strategy and resourcefulness, and by rejecting limiting logics and belief systems that stunt our intellectual growth and potential as a society, these artists emphasize the affective, relational, and multimodal dimensions of live Black art as both a symbol and blueprint for the futures we actively manifest every day. Within the labor of these artists, I am reminded that spirit is not a thing embedded in the work itself so much as it is what has risen from the unique offering of its impermanence. It must be shared to activate, inspire, and motivate. Spirit is what lingers long after the theatrical moment has ended. It’s the lives that it touches and reverberates. This is the imminent potentiality Paris speaks of when considering Black performance so often personal, politically charged, challenging traditional notions of beauty, form, and representation all the while creating radical reimaginations of selfhood within and alongside community.
