OBSERVATIONS: DANIELLE RUSSO & CHRISTOPHER-RASHEEM MCMILLAN

OBSERVATIONS: DANIELLE RUSSO & CHRISTOPHER-RASHEEM MCMILLAN

AN EVENING OF WITNESSING DANCE

SINCE THOU WAST PRECIOUS IN MY SIGHT, VOL. 2 and The Pew both use ritual, resistance, and desire as catalysts for locating the catharsis of grief between, in, and through the body. In Russo’s SINCE THOU WAST PRECIOUS IN MY SIGHT, VOL. 2, Kevin Shannon and Jaruam Xavier engage in a highly athletic duel confronting habits, desires, and grievances to submit. When cycles of will and expectation transcend into the ritualized, what is the endurance, the ceiling, the surrender of trust and conviction? She draws upon themes of original sin, obedience, penance, and absolution from her own experience with Catholic devotions. In Mcmillan’s The Pew, religious in nature, stages the black body as a site for resistance, regeneration, and reconstruction by mobilising the intertextual residue left behind by/in Talley Beatty's The Mourner’s Bench (1947). By investigating his own spiritual background and that of other black queer people,…