by Essence Harden
Essence Harden in conversation with Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors on the occasion of her MFA thesis performance “Respite, Reprieve and Healing: An Evening of Cleansing.”
Essence: With this work, I was thinking of the function of the audience and the relationship between what it is you’re performing as an act of reprieve and the people who are present/bearing witness to that undertaking. Can you talk a little bit about the audience and possibilities of rest/reprieve in this assembly?
Patrisse: What I recognize more and more, especially through this MFA is I’m not interested in just creating a performance or installation that’s for one part of a room or gallery. I’m interested in creating an entire world, what I call portals, and the audience is a vital part of that. The conversation for me is about how to have an embodied audience.
The intentionality for this piece began with the invitation which requested that everyone wear white. It was asking the audience to set an intention for themselves, perhaps internally asking “what white am I going to wear?” “what does white represent for me?” Each audience has to question their part and their relationship to what they’re coming to. And, that’s incredibly important. And then, you know, for very pragmatic reasons and the tradition that I practice white is a color you wear when you’re going to ceremony and ritual. So I wanted that intentionality to come with my audience.
The other piece of this is, I’m very disinterested in an audience that arrives for sole entertainment. What you see in this piece, is that the audience has to move [with me], it has to be somewhere, see something else, and move its body collectively. The audience, as a collective, experiences this thing that happens to be my performance and then they have this thing that they then have a collective memory and experience around which they can be in response to.
Essence: It was a procession of sorts.
Patrisse: Absolutely! The procession and collectivity felt imperative. At the end of the performance, before we even do the, “artists talk back,” the first thing I asked the audience to do is check in with each other. What came up for you? How was that for you? Where are you at right now?
Essence: Can you say more about exhaustion and restoration as it relates to your exhibitions’ language around being a “black queer woman”? Does rest become possible when faced with members of an audience that are not necessarily black nor queer?
Patrisse: What’s different about performance, in theory, is that you have agency and part of the exhaustion and fatigue I’m talking about is the lack of agency. So someone gets shot by the police, no agency, your mom loses her job, no agency, you die because of medical neglect, no agency. But these acts of performance in Respite, Reprieve and Healing allow me to have agency on how the audience shows up, how I show up, and when I get to stop.
I don’t believe black people ever get respite and so we have become incredibly intelligent about how we come to peace. Part of that and the tradition of black arts and the legacy that I come from around black performance, movement, and theatricality is that there is a history of us using those spaces as a way to undo what we’ve experienced. And while it’s fascinating when someone was reflecting to me, “it was hard to watch you do these things while an entire audience was taking pictures of you, it was almost re-performing what you don’t want.” I said, yes, that is also part of the performance and I also had agency in all of that. I got to decide how that got shaped, what you saw, how you saw it, and when you saw it. That [agency] is super powerful for a group of people whose very existence has been about taking away our self-determination.
Essence: You talked earlier about the saturation of our current technoscape and images of black people coming towards violence and/or death. The want, in your work, is to offer a saturation of images of another kind with ritual and beauty. Thus the importance of multiple levels of documentation (photographs, hashtags, video).
Respite, Reprieve and Healing opens with a hair ritual wherein thirteen people each have their hair washed in coconut milk and honey, then styled, and are ultimately bound as a group with a long band of rope. Seeing everyone entwined together with brown rope, I first thought about black people in the holds of a slave ship and being lynched. But also how rope is a truly versatile tool of abundance when you’re talking about farming, building, and coming to someone else’s aide. So, why rope in this act of hair braiding and binding?
Patrisse: Hair washing for black people is incredibly sacred. When you grow up in a black home, not just anyone touches or washes your hair. Washing is a very intentional act that doesn’t happen daily or weekly. It’s very particular, and there’s a whole journey especially for black women around our hair. Whether our hair was processed or not, when/if we came to our natural hair journey, asking other black for advice on products, styling, etc. So doing this in public, having witnesses to the hair wash made it an event.
The hair wash piece, as the entryway into this conversation on respite, cleansing and healing has a baptismal quality. In the tradition I practice we call our heads Ori, and Ori is not just your head, it’s also your direct connection to God. With that direct connection to God we are all also connected to each other. So I wanted to reclaim the rope, especially this [brown, coarse, thick] rope that looks like a lynching rope that the moment you see, especially for black people, you wonder if this performance is about to go sideways. There are particular signifiers in the piece that are for black people.
So this rope comes out and instead of it being something that goes across peoples necks it goes across people’s crowns. It’s done very gently and delicately, almost like this is what we do after we wash our hair, we tie it individually to hold it together, and we use each other to hold each other together. In the past, we’ve seen images of multiple black people tied by rope being lynched but this time these black people are being tied together by rope along their godheads. That visual felt really important.
“Respite, Reprieve and Healing: An Evening of Cleansing” opens at Highways Performance Space June 21st and 22nd as part of BEHOLD! Queer Arts Series, Performance, Spoken Word, Theatre.
Essence Harden is an independent curator, writer, and Ph.D. candidate living and working in Los Angeles. Find them here: @ essenceh and http://www.essenceharden.com/
Curate LA is Los Angeles’ most comprehensive art discovery platform. Our mission is to promote the economic and cultural development of L.A. by making its artistic ecosystem radically accessible to everyone. We deliver curated information on upcoming shows, exhibitions, museums, artist studios and galleries across the city. Connect with us on Instagram,Twitter and Facebook + help us in our mission to promote L.A.’s artists, galleries and institutions by becoming a supporting member here.
