Will Rawls engaged in a remote second residency during which he continued to work on his stop motion film and performance, [siccer]. This residency was hosted by MANCC remotely through the Petronio Residency Center (PRC) in Round Top, New York in response to the COVID –19 Delta Variant transmission in Florida. 

Building from the editorial term for a misspelled word, "[sic]", [siccer] is a dance and film project challenging widespread citation and misrepresentation of black bodies. An interdisciplinary artist, Rawls uses [siccer] to consider the history of images surrounding black bodies, the narrow avenues of expression that exist for black people in the media, and the relation of photography to black bodies.
   
This residency followed a film-making residency at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) where Rawls looked into methods of filmmaking and stop motion film. He and his collaborative team then spent their time together at the PRC exploring how the filmic and choreographic elements of [siccer] can be further developed through screenwriting, character, and storyboarding components of filmmaking. Rawls also investigated these through written and filmic analysis of revolutionary filmmakers such as William Greaves and Wendell B. Harris Jr.

Rawls will continue to receive writing and research support from MANCC in the form of a residency retreat with [siccer]’s writer and dramaturg Kemi Adeyemi in Los Angeles from December 13 – 16, 2021, as part of MANCC’s Embedded Writers Initiative. Adeyemi will join Rawls to continue their joint efforts towards the [siccer] book, an edited anthology of writers engaged in the intersections of black performance, visual culture, and cultural practice in the 21st century—particularly in a post-Black Lives Matter era when black performance and black visibility are rapidly evolving vis à vis institutional representation. MANCC will also provide additional commissioning support to towards the launch of this book project, which will contribute to both dance and visual arts fields. Projected completion date of the book is Fall 2023. Rawls will also receive research support in the form of Florida State University scholar meetings in January 2022.
 
[siccer] is set to premiere in 2023 at The Kitchen, NYC.
 
This residency and the Embedded Writers Initiative and Commissioning Program is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Will Rawls came to MANCC for the first time to further the development of [siccer]. Building from the editorial term for a misspelled word, "[sic]", [siccer] is a dance and film project challenging widespread citation and misrepresentation of black bodies. An interdisciplinary artist, Rawls uses [siccer] to consider the history of images surrounding black bodies, the narrow avenues of expression that exist for black people in the media, and the relation of photography to black bodies. Simultaneously, he questions the ways in which movement disintegrates images to create time-based experiences. Exploring the restlessness of gesture and language as strategies of black performance, [siccer] cultivates elusiveness and abstraction to resist the "racial gristmill" of mass media.

The film portion of [siccer] uses stop-motion film, which is a collection of moving images that are animated to create movement without sound. In this collection of moving images, Rawls questions the labor of being a body inside of a photograph, ultimately using this film as a metaphor for mass media.

Following an intensive film-making residency in Los Angeles, Rawls and his collaborative team focused their time at MANCC on development of the movement and language portions of the work. As part of MANCC’s Embedded Writers Initiative, Kemi Adeyemi joined the residency. Adeyemi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington and leads the Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator and public lecture series rooted in expansive and dynamic investigations of blackness in contemporary art. Upon completion of the project, Adeyemi and Rawls plan to create a literary publication that they describe as “writing alongside the project,” under the working title Sensitivity Training.

During their collaborative time at MANCC, Rawls, Adeyemi, and four additional dance artists from across the country worked to understand how movement of the voice can undo fixity and meaning. Rawls used scores that involve loud camera shutter clicks as a means, in part, to invoke the idea of documentation and labor. They shared their ongoing research during an informal showing in the School of Dance, which included both live movement and stop motion film. Rawls also had the opportunity to meet with Professor Ravi Howard who teaches in the English Department at FSU in the areas of creative writing, fiction, creative nonfiction, and African-American narratives. The two discussed the topic of regional blackness, the role of gesture, and the overlaps in generating embodied material versus that which lives in language.

[siccer] will premiere in 2021 at The Kitchen in NYC.

Support for Adeyemi’s time at MANCC was provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.