IN PRACTICE: Reconstructing Reconstruction with Chris Evans
by SIMA BELMAR
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GRIEVE in the con- text of perpetual marginalization and terror- ization? What are the contours of grief in the afterlife of ancestral, epigenetic, and inter- generational trauma? And what if what is grieving is the earth itself? What if there’s no way to move on? Chris Evans’ collaborative, multidisci- plinary, multimedia event Reconstructions Performance Ritual is divided into four parts: a gallery installation performance in three cycles (Cycle 1: Find Me, Cycle 2: Grief, Cycle 3: Rage); a staged performance (This Must Break); a procession through Oakland’s Idora Park/Rancho San Antonio/Ohlone Land neighborhood; and a shared meal curated by Thuy Tran. The installation, staged perfor- mance, and meal took place over two week- ends in March at the Idora Park Project Space at the corner of Shattuck and 56th Street, a former French laundry built in 1934. In the gallery, grief, rather than a unidi- rectional and finite process, is a cycle that repeats. And rage, rather than operating as a necessary step on the path towards mov- ing on from grief, is the core affect around which the project circles. Reconstructions Performance Ritual is the final installment of the Reconstruction Study Project that Evans began in collaboration with Broun Felli- nis saxophonist/keyboardist/vocalist David Boyce in 2015. Each study is an investigation into the affective afterlife of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in the US. Through- out the work, Evans, dancer/choreographer Byb Bibene, and Boyce embody historical, biblical, and composite characters to explore the question, “What is the liberatory potential of rage?” Evans writes, “The project begins with the premise that we in America are born, in the words of Lillian Smith, onto a ‘Trem- bling Earth,’ a trembling that began with the first violence done to the First Peoples.” Idora Park Project Space is the home of choreographer/dancer/director/cellist Evans and her partner in life and art, installation artist/sculptor/exhibitions designer Ernest Jolly. The couple worked on Reconstructions Performance Ritual with Bibene, Boyce, cos- tume designer/vintage clothing store owner/ one-woman-show-wonder Regina Evans, lighting designer/visual and performing art- ist Stephanie Anne Johnson, dancer/choreog- rapher Latanya D. Tigner, and co-producer curator/artist Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen. The number of backslashes alone attests to the range of experiences, interests, and talents that went into the construction of Reconstructions. I attended the penultimate performance ritual on March 30. What follows is a recon- struction of my trembling conversation with
Photos by Sibila Savage
Evans at Idora Park Project Space, in her liv- ing room, which had only recently been the site of the staged performance and shared meal segments of the ritual. Evans and I have talked a lot about her process and her ideas over the past few years so there will be under-explicated assumptions throughout our discourse. I hope you will allow your- self to float in the lazy river of our talk and worry not about extracting anything solid from its silty bed.
predominantly people of color. There’s some- thing about this self-healing that is happening within communities that have been trauma- tized and marginalized. I asked everyone who worked on the piece what kinds of things they did in order to process, what were their own personal ritu- als, and Latanya said something that made a lot of sense to me. She said, “I’m never out of it.” So it’s not really a question of processing it and then it being done. The couple nights after the show I couldn’t sleep because I felt like the earth was so sad and weighted upon. [ Tears. ] It’s such a huge question. There’s nothing I can do to solve that. But I can be in my work about it, around it. SB: You and I have talked a lot about what it means to listen. I consider myself a good listener but I’m often (always?) respond- ing to what I’m hearing in my head, which doesn’t feel like good listening to me. CE: We talk so much about listening and there’s so little listening that actually hap- pens. For the staged performance, when you walk in you’re hearing a story told in a language that most people wouldn’t recog- nize. It was the Ohlone language Chochenyo, the first language spoken on these lands by human beings. There was a night when people were buzzing with questions about the language, all of this talking. I didn’t want you to necessarily understand it. I wanted its meaning to come into your body. I wanted you to be in a state of not knowing and still allow something to come in. So at the last performance, Rhiannon read something I wrote about listening to the audience—that this is an opportunity to listen and let the unknown come into your body through your pores, through your ears, without you try- ing to capture it in words. I hope people had some experience of that because I think it’s key for anything to change. SB: You asked me to do some writing about this work. What does a writing that’s a lis- tening look like? Why write about a ritual performance? What does the writing serve? invisible as an artist and being made visible. Most of my collaborators are not as visible as they should be. They are super talented, accomplished people who don’t get enough support for what they do. And you’re who I wanted to write about it because I’ve talked to you a lot about this, I know you’re going to be aware of racial dynamics, you’re think- ing about history, you’re thinking about the embedded racism that is throughout so many of our artistic structures and institu- tions. And I was also curious to see what you would do. Your writing is a continuation of the work in a different form. CE: Part of it is practical, to have the docu- mentation. Part of it is I have felt fairly
ally give way to acceptance and forgiveness of self and others. But if you are a victim of systemic, structural violence that separates and hierarchizes humanities, then I can see that you’re always already living grieving, and then something has to give for you to feel the injustice, which is radically different. CE: That direction of anger to grief is a bit of a masculine construct and potentially a west- ern European white construct. For people who are not allowed to express anger, that anger gets buried under grief, and people who are not allowed to express anger are not allowed to be fully human members of a community. The only emotion available for them/us to express is grief or sadness or depression, because if you express anger you’d be killed. I’m interested in how to let that grief move through to find that righ teous anger. SB: How do you feel about what happened in the work that you made? What you were hoping to make visible, palpable? CE: I feel like this kind of ritual work that I did with this piece, that people like Amara [Tabor-Smith] and Ellen [Sebastian Chang] do, like Dohee [Lee] does, is happening in different places, and it’s as if we’re creating these pools of water that are starting to join. I feel almost funny saying I created this work because it came to me, like I was told, ok, this is your part to do to join the work of these other artists, who have influenced me and been such an important part of my growth as an artist. And the people I collaborated with on every aspect were so much a part of mak- ing it realize itself. I think this ritual work is also so much about healing participants. The audiences for this work are diverse and often
Sima Belmar: Why does rage follow grief in this work?
Chris Evans: David and Byb have a duet about grief, black men’s grief specifically, the loss of and assault on intimacy and connec- tion. After we finished the shows and in the process of coming back to life, it felt like the earth was grieving, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I think of rage as having this transformative power, particularly the Jim Coble story 1 , which was one of the first inspirations for the piece. Through his rage he transformed his life. How does rage get channeled into transformation? But I think the grief has to happen first because there’s so much trapped energy in people and then the rage can get expressed. SB: What you’re saying makes me think that moving from anger to grief to acceptance is a privileged order of emotional life. Like maybe you’re angry at your mother or your boss and that anger is getting in the way of feeling the grief over what you didn’t get that you needed in life. This suggests that the playing field is even and it is an individual process of internalizing pain that can eventu-
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