DEFINITIONS AND CONNECTIONS: A Conversation with Johnnie Cruise Mercer BY BENEDICT NGUYEN
Benedict Nguyen: What does artistic anarchy mean to you? Johnnie Cruise Mercer: The way my art is being made seems constrained by the stage structure that history has developed for art- ists of color. So I think that artistic anarchy is completely saying “No” to how we’re brought up – Let’s build again and let’s destroy this and actually create this thing from scratch. So there’s a bit of healing in the anarchy. I feel like a lot of things – even the idea of radical- ism – has come to a certain place of comfort. So I’m interested in questioning all of it. BN: What are you questioning in your work? JCM: I think I’m responding to expectation. I’m a black artist so there’s a certain way I should be radicalizing my practice or doing certain things. I’m responding to capital- ism; I’m responding to the molds that came before me. And then I’m questioning my part in it, and then questioning the expectation for me to question in a certain way. I feel an expectation to share a certain way, to share a certain type of thing, to present it in a way that is acceptable to certain people. Without the expectation of the community giving to you. There’s a mold, almost like a non-free- dom to ‘Black Radicalism.’ BN: If an artist is read as a radical black artist, what would the people who are reading that, who are casting that gaze upon them, expect out of that work? JCM: They’re expecting them to be black. They’re expecting a certain amount of off- puttingness, or a certain amount of feeling, or a certain amount of disruption, and also a certain amount of selling of your blackness. When people are like, “Oh, you’re a black radicalist. Oh you’re making work that’s black. You’re selling the blackness.”And it’s performing. If you’re performing your radical- ness, you’re not being radical at all, you’re just doing radical stuff to get the next gain profes- sionally. Especially in the United States, most of the things we dwell on as performance art- ists are based on minstrel systems and coonery.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Recently, the National Center for Choreography in Akron, Ohio started a low-residency dance writing labo- ratory. The lab currently houses a cohort of five writers from around the country, includ- ing Bay Area-based Sima Belmar, who con- tributes regularly to In Dance with her “In Practice” column. Dancers’ Group reached out to this group to seek fresh voices and perspectives on dance – coming from across the US – which we can bring back to our community. The following piece emerges from that outreach: Benedict Nguyen in a conversation with New York artist Johnnie Cruise Mercer about social justice, radical- ism, commodification in dance, and more. AFTER A PREVIEW performance of New York- based The Red Project NYC’s recent work, Sanctuary , Artistic Director Johnnie Cruise Mercer facilitated an open and rigorous dialogue with the audience. He openly ad- dressed difficult questions he was grappling with just a week before the premiere about the piece’s composition, music, casting, the- matics, and more. In our chat, Johnnie’s melting gelato simi- larly dripped over its cup as our conversation spilled over the distinctions between radical- ism and anarchy, the tacit (and overreaching) expectations of black artists, and the self- reflection central to creating community and performance. Aware of how I risked repeating these same expectations in the performance of this interview, I hoped to offer space for John- nie to shift the conversation beyond what it means to be a (radical) black artist to the field at large. He introduced his company as a group of artistic anarchists. What follows is his elaboration and ex- cerpts from our conversation:
Johnnie Cruise Mercer / photo by Barbara Shore
Johnnie Cruise Mercer / photo by Barbara Shore
Now, everyone’s not like that. There are black radicalists, who really say, ‘No. I’m gonna stand up for this. This is what I’m doing.’ BN: Care to give a shout out? JCM: Yeah, Brother(hood) Dance! Monstah Black and Hyperbolic! They are disobeying the rules of the stage and in some ways, even using the rules of the stage to make fun of the fact that they’re on stage. I think that’s the interesting thing when you're talking about composition of the body, composition of the society, that you’re no longer composing just the dance work that is acceptable for the space. You’re now com- menting on the actual space itself by rebel- ling against it. When I think about myself and how I go into work, I ask, “Why even do anything in that space in general when the ex- pectation when someone walks in is to watch you give to them and them not necessarily
outwardly give to you?” I mean, if you are in a stage space how do you destroy the stage space to the point where it doesn’t even look like a stage? Just a space that you’re inhabit- ing and that you can engage us as artists in? BN: Earlier, you mentioned how profession- al matters more than the art itself? JCM: Right now, because of capitalist struc- tures and the way that everything is made, you’re constantly put against what you need to do professionally to make work for your personal life and your financial life and what your art is. As a professional black artist, it is easier to label myself as a certain thing instead of actually exploring what it means to me per- sonally. Which doesn’t make any sense to me because in my eyes, blackness can’t even be contained by the word radicalism. A human
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in dance DEC 2017
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