Transnational Ritual Poetics of Blackness in Performance

Author

Nina A. Mercer, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Theatre and Performance

Advisor

Peter Eckersall

Committee Members

James Wilson

Jaqueline N. Brown

Subject Categories

Africana Studies | American Studies | Arts and Humanities | Dance | Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Performance Studies | Theatre and Performance Studies | Theatre History

Keywords

Performance Studies, African American Studies, Theatre, Dance, Ritual, Diaspora, Transnational

Abstract

In this dissertation, I investigate transnational ritual poetics of Blackness through a historical, cultural, and spatial lens, centering my exploration on the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and waterways. I show how these formal poetics activate Africana cosmologies, cosmogonies, and mythologies dramaturgically by centering contemporary New York City performance works that bring together dance, theatre, and music. I contextualize NYC performance case studies in relation to performance practices in contemporary Salvador da Bahia. I am particularly interested in how the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and water as formal poetics catalyze interventions along contested water-ways and landscapes marked by Black cartographic struggle in both public and reconstructed theatrical space in New York City, a port city connected to many other port cities throughout the Black Atlantic. I understand these performances as forming a diasporic and transatlantic constellation of Black spatial imaginings through ritualized intimacy and resistance, transmitting and evolving Black epistemologies and ontologies that are forever wed to the Middle Passage but never bound solely to it.

Recommended Citation

Mercer, Nina A., "Transnational Ritual Poetics of Blackness in Performance" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5355