“Whale Fall: abyss” is an ever evolving interdisciplinary work of film, installation and dance that was born from the sonic dissidence of Black grief. Do we give ourselves time to grieve? How can grief be decomposed and transformed? Whale Fall is a scientific term describing the process of a whale’s decomposition after it dies and falls to the ocean floor while providing nutrients for thousands of sea creatures. For this project, the Whale Fall becomes the decomposed dance, the space of grief and regeneration, the lamentation, the ecstasy, the song and the sonic release.

mayfield brooks (they/them) improvises while black* and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising while Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
*mayfield’s choreographic approach, Improvising while Black or IWB, developed after mayfield began to write about their personal experience of being racially profiled as they were Driving while Black or DWB in San Francisco, California. IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project that lives in the question of Blackness, and explores vocal and dance improvisation, (de)composition, breath choreographies, and pedagogies of embodied liberation. Like an ecology, IWB is continually evolving and moving.
improvisingwhileblack.com

Dorothy Carlos (she/her) is an experimental cellist and electronic musician working in improvised performance and multi-channel sound in New York City and Chicago. Her work utilizes randomized electronics and extended techniques to explore fragility and imaginaries. Solo performances have been presented internationally by e-flux, Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Big Ears Festival, default, Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, Chicago Jazz String Summit, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from New York University where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship, and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Monique Smith-McDowell (she/her) is a British performer and choreographer that weaves together the creative languages of dance, creative audio description and music to highlight the perspectives of the marginalized in relation to sociopolitical issues. Monique has had the pleasure to collaborate with artists such as Michael Turinsky, Ursina Tossi, Jerron Herman, Zwoisy Mears- Clarke and Richard Alston to name a few.

Naomi Sanfo-Ansorge (she/her) is a visually impaired dance educator, performer, access dramaturge, and audio describer. She lives and works in Hamburg and researches, among other things, as a dancer with the dance company Chorosom, the diversity of audio description, and dance that can be experienced with all senses.

[Source: tanzfabrik-berlin.de]

TFB Nr. 1934