This process grew out of the Fall 2021 Duke Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies course the Erotics of Race and Coloniality. It is supported by the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Duke Dance Program.
Photos by Robert Zimmerman.
The Meeting Place
an experimental practice co-facilitated by Courtney Crumpler and Lee Edwards
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The Meeting Place IS an experiment, a process, an embodied curiosity of what it means to belong with and alongside. It IS an exploration of conditions needed to meet one another in our multiplicity. The Meeting Place is NOT a solution, NOT product oriented. It IS a divestment from urgency in that it requires the permissioning of intentional slowness and moving at one’s own pace. The Meeting Place IS a listening practice, an ongoing consensual conversation without touch.
The questions guiding our practice are:
How do you want to meet yourself?
How do you want to meet others?
How do you want to be met?
What might prohibit you from meeting in those ways?
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Because racism and colonialism work by ordering our movements, desires, and ways of seeing and meeting others. This project carves out time and space to deepen embodiment and explore what it means to meet ourselves and each other.
Intrigued by Dr. Sharon P. Holland’s analysis of the role of the erotic in quotidian racist practice, in The Erotic Life of Racism, we wondered how an embodied practice could create alternative conditions for meeting.
Through taking an embodied or somatic approach to exploring the conditions of meeting, our goal is to develop a practice that ripples into our relationships over time.
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Our first meeting was on March 9th 6pm-9pm at The Ark Dance Studio, on Duke’s East Campus.
