Re-Processing the Body of Racial Trauma Multidirectional Memory and Decolonizing Somatic Workshops in Art/Performance
This essay traces the unlearning and transformation of racial violence and trauma through reparative workshops, developed as bodywork and micropolitical tools in the field of art in the late 1960s and today. In a historical critique, we analyze Anna Halprin’s iconic workshop series for Ceremony of U...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Gothenburg
2022-11-01
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| Series: | Parse Journal |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://parsejournal.com/article/re-processing-the-body-of-racial-trauma/ |
| Summary: | This essay traces the unlearning and transformation of racial violence and trauma through reparative workshops, developed as bodywork and micropolitical tools in the field of art in the late 1960s and today. In a historical critique, we analyze Anna Halprin’s iconic workshop series for Ceremony of Us (1969), created as a political performance project for the catharsis and healing of racial violence and trauma in response to the so-called Watts riots in Los Angeles (1965). This work will be juxtaposed with the contemporary project Merkabah for the Hoetep (since 2016) by Tabita Rezaire, as a “collective healing offering” and a somatic, mental, and spiritual way of mending. Both artists assume that violence and trauma caused by experiences of racism have inscribed themselves in the body and sedimented as corporeal archives in all intersectional dimensions of discrimination. We aim to critically investigate the different conceptions of trauma—structural, historical, and cultural—that occur in the artworks. The performance project Ceremony of Us (1969) was intended for the African American community and the (usually) white art and theater scene to mutually go through a process of catharsis and create a new community. As a prototype of the Western workshop model, it brought together many (body) therapeutic tools in the spirit of the Human Potential Movement. In contrast to these Western concepts of trauma, a movement of Black yoga therapy emerged in the US in the late 1960s, which provided fundamental knowledge to treat race-based traumatic stress and focused on African ancestry—as was the case in Kemetic Yoga. In light of this historical analysis, we investigate Tabita Rezaire’s contemporary reparative art practices, navigating digital, corporeal, and ancestral memory as sites of struggles. Addressing structural trauma and “slow violence,” her workshop Merkabah for the Hoetep (2016–20) is a decolonial form of somatic, mental, and spiritual resistance that nourishes visions of entanglement, mending, and kinship. |
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| ISSN: | 2002-0511 2002-0953 |