“I’m still thinking about the potential of using abstraction to speak to identity: How can these two things fit together when identity is so much about announcing, concretizing, and naming, and abstraction is about undoing? Of course, abstraction has roots in something real…
“What does it mean to break apart language, and its history, and to work with it pictographically? Dance has this process built into it already: its visual and affective impact scrambles language. It produces and speaks other languages of and about the body.” — Will Rawls*
WHAT REMAINS—a collaboration between poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, dancer/choreographer Will Rawls, and filmmaker and photographer John Lucas exploring how “erasure and exposure shape black American life”—comes to MCA/Chicago’s Warehouse this week.
Performers include Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis. The sound design is by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, production design by David Szlasa, and costume design by Eleanor O’Connell.
Tonight, the museum presents Rankine and Rawls for a discussion about their practice.
TALK—CLAUDIA RANKINE WITH WILL RAWLS
Tuesday, December 4, at 8 pm.
Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago.
Wednesday through Sunday, December 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, at 7:30 pm.
MCA Warehouse, 1747 West Hubbard Street, Chicago.
*”Will Rawls: 1000 Words,” Artforum, October 2018, 194.
Claudia Rankine, Will Rawls, and John Lucas, What Remains. Photographs © Julieta Cervantes, courtesy Live Arts Bard.
