Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and mourning in Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance

Abstract

I sit in a theatre in San Francisco in December 2021 feeling a palpable anticipation in the air. As Gerald Casel performs a choreographic accumulation to TLC's ‘Waterfalls', my body remembers learning Accumulation in dance history class. Indeed, words are soon projected on the back wall: ‘I am performing an accumulated sequence'; ‘It's an adaptation of Trisha Brown's choreographic device'; ‘She made a dance entitled ‘Accumulation' in 1971'. This performance is Casel's response through the body to the unacknowledged racial politics in postmodern dance and is the primary study of my investigation. In ‘Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and mourning in Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance', I analyse Not About Race Dance (2021) choreographed by Gerald Casel as a queer, decolonial performance that engages with mourning as regenerative refusal. In this article, I define constructions for queer dance and decolonial performance that are foundational to my reading of Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance. I then outline the relationship between Not About Race Dance and Neil Greenberg’s Not-About-AIDS-Dance. The titles of both works use irony to emphasize that the performances are, in fact, about AIDS and race respectively. Finally, I argue that this queer, decolonial performance work encompasses interplay between refusal and racial mourning, and propose that this performance is a manifestation of queer, decolonial performance and embodying the profound heaviness of loss and mourning that occurs because of racism. This is significant because it reveals the connections between queerness and decoloniality through performance and examines their links as acts of refusal and mourning in the work of a queer, BIPOC improvisational artist.