In response to the invitation to share my reflections on the movement of power immediately following the recent presidential election in the USA, I broke out and literally dusted off my copy of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelly. I recorded my favorite excerpts so that I could listen to the text while undertaking daily activities in the pregnant days awaiting election results. I listened to these words again and again, while taking a bath, while meditating, and – as you’ll see in the video – destroying a ballot that never reached its owner. I became hungry to feel the theories of the book, to – as the author urges – actually believe that something other than the dominant world order is possible. So I began listening to the excerpts while dancing, attempting to invite my body to know the theories outlined in the book. I have a belief that concepts such as power, movement, freedom or love cannot be understood without the body. My hope became that by dancing to the visionary words of Kelley I could access this type of embodied knowing and displace legacies of systematic social trauma inscribed on my body (proactive epigenetics?). Perhaps dance could allow passage of Kelley’s ideas into my cells so that all my life force might become enlisted to render a world according to such freedom dreams.
