We, Present in Space: Queer Performance Cultures of Transience and Care based in Black Feminisms

I rely on literary and performative investigations around home and comfort to reflect on how artists who identify as genderqueer, femme, or non-conforming (acknowledged as Queer, Transgender, and Non-binary identifying people or QTNs) establish relationships that encourage ethical practices in their performance communities. This project explores the multidimensional lives and art of living Black QTN dancers, choreographers, and movement artists in the Southern U.S. who I had the joy of working with from 2020-2021, and who continue to generate technologies of place-makings. Through the process of making literal and figurative space with others, I speculate on how caretaking practices among dancing QTNs develop values predicated on Black feminisms. This is in an effort to realize how much space the Black QTN voices may take up in progressive narratives of inclusivity and what that space may do to the way dance is produced. Following a process towards performance, this paper recognizes the metonymic power of site-specific dance performance and the transport of Blackness. Instead of considering the stage or place of dance as neutral, I posit that if people are there it will never be neutral and as such, we have to find ways to make brave spaces instead of safe ones. In doing so, I ask what kind of spaces do Black femmes move towards when our art is in conversation? What are the processes currently converging to prepare a space for us?