SLIPPAGE Performances - Talking Dance

SLIPPAGE is proud to announce two live performances in-person events at the Rubenstein Arts Center at 2020 Campus Drive, Durham on the Duke campus. i am black (you have to be willing to not know) and WHITE PRIVILEGE will each be performed on Friday, October 29. i am black will be offered at 12 noon, and WHITE PRIVILEGE will perform at 7pm.

These are the first two works in the Talking|Dance series, co-commissioned by the American Realness festival and Theater Magazine. These performances were conceived to be alongside the Reckoning with Racism in the American South research series at Duke University. Each work premiered in New York City, and each has toured internationally, with WHITE PRIVILEGE scheduled for performances in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in December 2021. "i am black [you have to be willing to not know]" (2016) and "WHITE PRIVILEGE" (2018) each deal with Black creativity and experimental artmaking, the conditions of white supremacy in systems of professional artmaking; and the terms of pre-acceleration and everyday racisms that undergird algorithmic design and AI modeling.

The Talking|Dance series are each hour-long explorations of ideas that involve the audience in the creation of the event. i am black has been performed at the Bull City Black Theater Festival, but WHITE PRIVILEGE is new to the area. i am black addresses the experience of being one-of-few people of color in the context of experimental performance, while WHITE PRIVILEGE means to call out systems of supremacy that create containers for Black experience. Too often, well-meaning white people fail to recognize how they are entirely complicit in the disavowals that craft Black rage. They imagine social circumstance as a somehow "natural occurrence" and become satisfied by witnessing Black creativity as difference. The terms of white privilege allow for this detachment, as if we were not all incredibly traumatized by the deeds of racist and greedy ancestors. This work deploys the "Synth Ball," a live processing controller developed in the SLIPPAGE lab by collaborators and musicians Quran Karriem and Becca Uliasz, to underscore portions of the spoken text.

Both performances will be in the von der Heyden Studio Theater of the Rubenstein Arts Center. The performances are free and open to the public. There will be capacity limits and masking protocols.