UBW Partnership Fellow | May 18 - 28, 2022
g1(host):lostatsea
As the third artist in an ongoing partnership with Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Florida State University School of Dance MFA alumna nia love came to MANCC for the first time following a postponement due to COVID-19. (love follows prior UBW partnership artists Marjani Forte-Saunders in 2018, and Ananya Chatterjea in 2019 and 2020.)
Love came into residence with several collaborators to develop UNDERcurrents, a continuation within and fresh departure from love’s long-term project, g1(host):lostatsea. A serial, multi-media, interactive performance and research platform, g1(host):lostatsea marks her continuous engagement with the memory and “afterlives” of transatlantic slavery. The project pivots on this fundamental query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect?
Building on these conceptual concerns, UNDERcurrents invites audiences to probe the seam between catastrophic history and quotidian memory and tend to the textures of kinship bonds and generational care. These processes are explored through two primary thematic elements: water and doors. The point of departure for captive Africans into the middle passage is described as “the door of no return.” Conjuring the continual resonance of this world making and breaking threshold, this project’s presentation will be structured as an immersive and participatory audience experience through a performance installation.
While in residence, love and her collaborators shot footage along the shorelines and out at sea, with free dives off the coast of Cape San Blas, near the site where the ashes of her father, former FSU Department of Art Professor and famed metalworker and sculptor, Ed Love, had been ceremonially spread. In her return to the waters of the Gulf coast and to Tallahassee, love revisits the legacy of her father and family specific to the region, in addition to the history of the region’s Black communities.
love and filmmaker Rhonda Haynes worked with an FSU School of Communication graduate student and a recent alumna to collect footage in a variety of different techniques for both 360-degree and conventional filming methods. The second half of the residency was then spent in Tallahassee, where they edited the footage remotely with videographer and editor Aiden Un, and investigated different methods of presentation of the work as an installation through a 360-degree projection dome in addition to experiments with projection in gallery spaces at the Museum of Fine Art (MoFA) at FSU. While working with the 360 dome, love shared her work with several members of the FSU and Tallahassee community including those with ties to her father.
love’s residency was made possible in partnership with Urban Bursh Women Choreographic Center Initiative’s (CCI) Choreographic Fellowship program. This partnership is funded, in part, by the Mellon Foundation.
Collaborators in Residence: Makeda Lily Love-Roney [Movement Artist], Aidan Un [Filmmaker/Editor - working remotely], Rhonda Haynes [Filmaker/Director]
Maggie Allesee
