“I want to tell you about the splitting, of a female body—how I squeezed into it—fitting barely, of the texture of melancholy, of a sycophantic love, draw a flicker for you, let you enter as if entering me.” Dawn Lundy Martin, from “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem, Four: I/M/A/G/E” in A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering.   Commingling in the past month’s news: the remembrance of Ana Mendieta’s death evoked by Carl Andre’s retrospective opening at DIA, HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? pulling out of the Whitney Biennial, and the May 23^rd rampage of Eliot Rodger that killed six people and left 13 wounded. While it’s possible to view these stories as isolated incidents, loosely connected by timing, their interconnectedness is far too real. Misogyny and racism, embedded within the social and institutional structures that dictate authority and control, don’t seem to have lost their power.   In thinking about bodies, it becomes very obvious that it is the bodies of Others - bodies that are either not cisgender male, or not white, or both - that are the kinds of bodies meant to endure these injustices. Reading these events as bodies helps one see more clearly how, in the persistence of historical narratives of white or male or white and male superiority, entitlement, and dominance, there are those who will always be sacrificed, and as such end up becoming sacrificial symbols rather than subjects in their own right.     I concluded my last post on luciana achugar’s OTRO TEATRO considering the utility of pain “as that which connects us to this earth” and the idea of taking pleasure in enacting revolt. I see this proposition as a precarious one; how to view our wounds as spaces of fecundity and potential that hold the key to more truthful power. Or actual power. But how do we not stay within the realm of sacrifice? How can our bodies signify other meanings and ways of seeing, being seen, valuing and being valued?   The title of my series, “Witch Craft,” was taken from a comment made by choreographer, Jen Rosenblit, at a L.A.B. discussion at the Kitchen where she posed the question, however facetiously, “where is the witch craft in craft?” This question seemed to link my interests, in curating as making space, in performance as a sometimes ritual, and the process of making as part magic. It’s also about locating and transmuting the darkside of power and power-relations.   So it seems only fit to mention Rosenblit’s A Natural Dance, here, in my final post of the series. I want to talk about the moment in the dance, in which she engages with dancer, Hilary Clark. It was the first time I had seen them dancing together, although Rosenblit took up Clark’s role in a touring version of Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show (UFS).   In A Natural Dance, the pair appeared to alternate stepping in front of one another across the stage, as if attempting to protect each other from the audience’s gaze. While turning, Clark’s face of protestation or sarcasm grew and grew until it became theatrically etched into the audience’s gaze. Making their way upstage, they began to repetitively toss their heads toward the back wall of the theater, in a moment that felt like a world in and of itself. Something about their dancing went right into and through me. It was undeniable. It was force and beauty and feminist rage. Rage in their fingertips sweeping out, in their necks pushing forward, and their feet on the floor. It was in that moment that I felt like a breath went into my body, a breath I didn’t know I needed to take.     I briefly sensed that this might have been a comment on their roles in Lee’s piece. But this wasn’t about fierceness for fierceness’ sake, enacted to fulfill an image. It was about Rosenblit and Clark dancing on and for their own terms. What I admire in Rosenblit’s work, and especially in A Natural Dance, is her ability to set her own terms for choreography and for how performing bodies are to be viewed. In this sense, her aesthetic choices necessarily become political acts. As Eva Yaa Asentewaa commented, “if anything happens between and among those bodies in space, it happens in the charged and naturally absurd space of juxtaposition and repetition, not because someone once laid out Rules of Choreography. Or rules of anything.”   It felt only appropriate to see a Natural Dance the same weekend that artnet published an interview with members of HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?. Witnessing Rosenblit on her own aesthetic and ideological terms reflected, in part, the Yams’ pursuits to create their own terms at the Whitney. In both instances, these artists have sought to carve out a space for the agency of their work as distinctly not normative, and meant as such to question normativity with regard to the body, identity, and ways of making work.     Question: How to enact a kind of revolt that can proliferate into new forms of recognition and understanding after the immediacy of cathartic rage?   “What kind of understanding will sink into the body? It’s just one body despite other previously stated facts and when it feels something it really does. It changes, though, and it grows up and looks completely different in the face.” Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline.   “Sometimes that’s the way that white supremacy works: The actual people who are perpetuating it have no analysis, or they pretend to have no analysis, about what they are doing—and you just feel a deep hurt at not being taken seriously. Our souls, our art, our position, our politics, are completely not being given consideration, Christa Bell, as interviewed by Ben Davis and with the Yam collective on artnet May 30, 2014.     I want to imagine spaces where artists and audiences can come into being as an act of co-creation. I also feel it is necessary to desire new images and new narratives, and to create out of this desire. I want to believe that we can open up spaces for the unrecognizable, and instigate new languages and forms of knowledge from our own subjectivities.   - MARISSA PEREL Marissa Perel is a Brooklyn based artist and writer. Her working method is interdisciplinary and includes performance, installation, video, text, collaboration and curating. Her work has been widely shown in New York and abroad, and her criticism has been published on many on-line platforms. She originated the column, Gimme Shelter: Performance Now on the Art21 blog, and was an editor of Critical Correspondence, the on-line dance and performance journal of Movement Research. She has contributed to the Performance Club, Bomblog, Bad At Sports, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. www.marissaperel.com