Diffracted Temporalities

Abstract

This article engages with North-American choreographer Trajal Harrell's interrogation of the relationship between performed histories, presents and futures. Working with the new materialist concept of diffraction, it examines how his choreographies engage with crucial questions surrounding racial politics and the construction of history, arguing that his works are performative and imaginative enactments of an ethical responsibility to rethink dominant cultural and historical discourses. Through an engagement with Harrell's Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series (2009-2017), a convergence is highlighted between his experimental performance practice and Donna Haraway's and Karen Barad's idea of diffraction as a method for recording and accounting for interferences, patterns of difference and entanglements of phenomena. The seven works of the series, identified by size from extra-small to extra-large, explore the idea of an imaginary encounter between New York's post-Cunningham choreographers and the voguing tradition in the early 1960s – the socio-historical impossibility of Harlem's black and Latino drag-ball scene meeting the predominantly white and middle-class world of the early postmodern dance of Judson Dance Theater. Through the lens of the new materialist notion of diffraction, which troubles the idea of the absolute separation of entities and illuminates their relationality, such impossibility can be entertained, as matter and discourse are seen as entangled and produced by shifting relations – of power, of bodies, of identities. Thus, a diffractive approach offers an ethico-epistemological model for the understanding of the material-discursive entanglement of seemingly opposing conditions. The article proposes that, in reimagining dance's past, Harrell's work diffracts temporalities, affirming and practising the possibility of other histories and of thinking history differently.

Notes

1 Elsewhere (Perazzo Domm 2019), working with Barad’s notions of intra-action and diffraction, I have written about choreographies that attend to the ethical and political im/possibilities of the present and envision alternative understandings of the world.

2 I first saw the piece when it was presented in London in June 2016 at Sadler’s Wells Lilian Baylis studio. In the summer of 2017, a large retrospective was organized by the Barbican Art Gallery as part of the performance exhibition ‘Hoochie Koochie’, 20 July–13 August 2017 (Barbican Centre 2017).

3 This was mentioned, for instance, in Harrell’s introduction to Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (M2M), Barbican Art Gallery, London, 29 July 2017.