Creative Practices - Digital Portfolio

The SATURN Chapters was initiated during the Fall 2024 semester of my Graduate Creative Practices III course. As a part of our final project, we were required to create and installation in response to our research as well as create a digital portfolio in response to a series of questions and prompts. Here is my portfolio and responses .

Statement of Project Concept

The focus of this project was to start telling the story of SATURN. Over the past four years, I’ve been creating this world-building project explored in dance performances, films, and installations, allowing the dance process to generate the story. Through a series of residencies, showings, performances, and installations over the years, my team and I have been able to set the foundation for the world and chart a course for this mythical sci-fi journey through space and time.

I am an Afrofuturistic dance artist who retells folklore from the African diaspora through dance. As a griot for the future, I wait and listen for the stories and myths that ask to be told through my work as I create. During the Fall 2024 semester, the folktale of the Flying Africans came to me and asked to be told through SATURN. Upon acceptance and reflection, I realized that the makings of the story of the Flying Africans existed in my body well before I was aware.

In my punking freestyle practice and my choreography of my character in the world of SATURN, Black Copper, I had been using my arms as wings; flapping and stretching them as I imagined Black Copper as a humanoid phoenix rising from the ashes. So, when the folklore made itself known, I dove back into the annals of filmed performances and installations over the 4 years and uncovered what has become the first chapter of SATURN, The Pluto Eras.

Chapter I journeys through time from the perspective of a parallel universe to ours with similar ecological and social-political challenges and moves through hundreds of years to set the stage for the performances that have taken place in the SATURN series thus far. Each era is marked by the transit of Pluto through the zodiacal constellations and describes how this parallel universe initiated a multi-generational project to abolish systems of oppression titled SATURN. The subsequent and surrounding events are meant to add context to the performances of A Message… and SATURN, and the introduction of The Living Ancestors.

The concept of this project is the initiation of an odyssey through long-form storytelling as an entry point to live performances and installations that have happened and will premiere in the future. I am interested in building an audience around a story that has many chapters similar to how Marvel comics, particularly the X-Men comics, have multiple runs that progress the story of familiar characters over decades.

I am not sure any dance artist with roots in performance-making has done something like this before. I understand that there are stakes when setting out to do something that hasn’t been done before. As an artist, the risk and stakes are often what keep us up at night and dampen the fun of making art. At this time, I choose not to place my attention on what we might gain from a story about liberation and abolishing oppression through time. I am excited by what my collaborators and I are learning about what it means to be living ancestors to the future who might inherit a healthy global ecology and a world free from oppression. And, I am thrilled to witness how people choose to respond to the SATURN series, and how they might be inspired to change their lives.

Stories are our most powerful resource for creation. We are who we are because of the stories we tell of ourselves and the stories that are told about us. As a dance artist, I am excited to contribute to the great constellation of stories. For asl long as I live, I will be unendingly grateful to witness these stories at work in the world.

Q: “How is your work in conversation with others”

I work collaboratively in every aspect of SATURN, and in the moments, I chose to work solo, they were in preparation for collaboration. With that said, as a dance artist and griot, retelling stories is a collaborative act. I am not creating an “original” story nor is that my goal. My goal is to preserve stories by identifying the framework of stories, myths, and tales that have been retold many times over to retell them again in respect to the framework. With the Flying Africans folktale, the framework has three themes: enslavement/oppression, flight, and heroism. In all of the major retellings I studied this semester, these themes remained consistent. How the themes were explored differed from telling to retelling. For example, in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the theme of enslavement was traditionally told with respect to the transatlantic slave trade. Flight was taken at face value as one of the characters was described as literally up and flying away. However, heroism was challenged as some characters saw their ancestor who flew back to Africa as a hero and were uplifted by the story, while others were devastated by the sudden absence of a husband and father at a time when the presence of an adult man ensured certain privileges.

Description of Creative Process/Methods

Q: What is the relationship between your research and the technologies you utilized?

Filmmaking often requires a script before a camera is picked up and a shot is taken. In creating a script, a story is crafted and comes to life. As I research stories, myths, and folktales from the African diaspora to retell them in a future context, I am interested in how I can utilize filmmaking to tell aspects of the SATURN story that are more difficult to tell on the stage and in performance. With the folk tale of the Flying Africans, I have written a character to have flown off into the sky from fire and ash. Pyrotechnics and rocket-style flight are possible in live performance, yet the safety measures of doing so require a level of risk I am unwilling to subject and person to. This is when filmmaking enters the chat.

As I mentioned before, I am setting the groundwork for multiple chapters (i.e. – multiple films) with the beginning of this series. In preparing to collaborate with many artists on a film set and in post-production, I practiced doing all the roles required to bring Chapter I to fruition. The credits detail all the positions I played. I used DaVinci Resolve as the software for editing the film and an DSLR Canon camera to film the scene of me on set at the Gammage Auditorium.

Q: “How did you prepare for audience engagement/public interface?”

I am excited by the notion that perspective determines our reality. When given the opportunity to create an installation for the final project of Creative Practices for the Fall 2024 semester, I chose to set up an environment where everyone’s perspective would be unique and determine how the received the story told in Chapter I: The Pluto Eras.

So, I went through the annals of my performance repository and shared a link to each participant in class with a set of instructions. I invited them all to play the video from any point (leaving at least 30 minutes left), and place their devices that were playing the video anywhere in the room. What this created was a constellation of moving images that offered a portal into a parallel reality. No two videos were alike, yet many of the videos were from the same performance series.

Participants got to choose which screen they placed their attention on while Chapter I: The Pluto Eras played in the room and occupied the auditory space.

Q: “In what way did making an installation give you new insights into your work?” 

The newest insight that came through was the insight to produce short film chapters to tell the story of SATURN.