Improvising While Black
Improvising While Black is “mayfield’s choreographic approach, Improvising While Black or IWB, developed after mayfield began to write about their personal experience of being racially profiled as they were Driving While Black or DWB in San Francisco, California. IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project that lives in the question of Blackness, and explores vocal and dance improvisation, (de)composition, breath choreographies, and pedagogies of embodied liberation. Like an ecology, IWB is continually evolving and moving in relation to other organisms and environments to conjure ancestral healing with human and non-human ancestors.”
mayfield’s expansive and immersive performance and research practice situates the viewer within acoustic ecologies of the mind, stringing to gether media, installation, composition, interactivity, the printed word, fixed, and live media. Their seminal work “Whalefall’ deals with animal and ancestral otherness and interconnection. It is a spiritual exploration through recorded media and participatory mediation, transcending and at the same time rooting us more firmly in the here and now.
They say on their website
“My dance disorients, decomposes and becomes wild.”
Sofy: How did Whalefall come together sound wise?
mayfield: I had been listening to whale sounds as the creation of the work and over time I started accumulating other sounds. For example; I got my own sound recording equipment and I read the first and last chapter of Moby Dick. But I whispered it in a really hoarse whisper, and then I sang the song strange fruit without the words. Then I had different renditions of it with the words and I made this whole collection of sounds, whispers, speaking in tongues.
Singing: The two texts that I included were the Moby Dick text and the Book of Jonah. The prophet Jonah gets swallowed by a whale. I read that, I think, in a chant. Then I just kept collecting these different sounds.
When I started working with the composer for the film I gave him the sounds and he chose some to use for the soundtrack. Then when I did the installation that you saw at CPR, that soundtrack was a different soundtrack than the one in the film. That was the same
sustained sound piece that lasted for four and a half mins so
it was just playing on loop the whole time that the exhibit was up.
That was really fun to make because I got to use more of the material that I had been accumulating to make the film that I hadn’t yet used.
So at the very beginning, in the film, before I sit down and knit I bring a portable record player with me into the room along with this album called that’s part that was part of the series called “Environments” by the sound artist Irv Teibel.
The one that I used was the Psychological Ultimate Seashore and it’s just the sound of the ocean for one whole side and it’s the first environment album out of 11.
In the film I’m listening to that album while knitting and looking out the window and that is a part of the film soundtrack. I don’t think I use that album from the films in the soundtrack or in the sound piece that was in the gallery space but, when you walk through the gallery space, on the right you could go into a little room with that album.
Sofy: I listened to all of them
mayfield: There’s so many. That’s what was in the film; that album and the listening booth served as another layer of sound for that particular incarnation of the Whalefall. It was just such a multi-layered process – I worked with a composer who was really great Everett Saunders. I gave him some whale sounds and he integrated it with my voice and with sounds of water. It was really beautiful. He put some of his music in it to make it watery. I really appreciated that. I grew up singing in a church so that’s also part of my life. Growing up, I was very involved in musical things. I was in the marching band and in the high school band and I played the flute and I sang in my church choir.
Sofy: You have quite the musical background.
mayfield: As a kid, no formal training, just—I guess the being in the in the marching band was formal–
Sofy: I was gonna say that sounds really formal
[Laughter]
mayfield: The church choir too, it’s a choir that’s true, you get conducted and you read off of sheet music– it’s very proper.
Sofy: In the context of those thoughts about music, sometimes I talk to people about their idea of this encompassing sound or a sublime sound. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the notion of the sublime or the the wall of sound or however that translates for you and how you use it in your work.
mayfield: Such a great question. The sublime or the wall of sound, you could also say an ocean of sound. It’s when the sound is so encompassing that you’re floating in it and it’s not a melody, it’s not a tune that you listen to, you’re just in it. This grand which definitely a lot of parts of Whalefall have that.
I think because I grew up in the church that sublime sound that you’re talking about the exalted elevated kind of challenge of the church. I grew up in a born-again pentecostal fundamentalist church so it was gospel singing and I think that definitely influences my work. But it’s not the work, so I love the image of the wall of sound. The wall of sound is very porous and so I’m thinking more about an auditory field that I’m now existing in. This whole way I’m making this series, is a Whale Fall cycle. The first one of course was the film that you saw and the second one; hopefully it’ll be live but I also want it to be a film. We’ll be really going deep into the sound. How to create all these different cascading sounds and maybe expand our auditory field. The space that I’m going to be working in is a church and it’s a dance space which is housed in Saint Mark’s church over on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. They have a balcony and, since it’s a church the sound is really big in there.
I’m even thinking of including silence as sound or sound as silence or just silence. The other thing that was really fascinating for me is that when I started working in the space at Abrons for the film I noticed the piano and I don’t know how to play the piano but it was so big and bulky and when I started moving it the sound of the moving of the piano was really beautiful so we picked up that sound in the piece too. Then I was sweeping the floor and that sound is picked up, so there’s a piano at the dance space in the church and I definitely want to use that piano somehow. It’s a grand piano which is smaller, but the other thing I learned about pianos after I made Whalefall is that a small piano is the same size
as the whale’s heart.
[I’m] just so fascinated with these creatures and the way they live in a world of sound. That’s how they see. So shifting the senses to it’s synesthesia based on sound. What rainbow would an assortment of sounds create in the mind of a whale?
Sofy: That’s an amazing question.
mayfield: It’s so beautiful; they live mostly in darkness and the depths. and that was really important to me to start to imagine myself as a sounding creature so that wherever I go if I just take a moment to attune and listen to all the layers of sound that are around me it shifts my awareness of the space that I’m in, of my body, of just how intricate and complex the ways that our auditory system is. Just filtering through all these different sounds. I want to slow everything down and then it’s gonna get a vibration, how do you get that vibration so that the sound is also an embodied experience? Well not always maybe it’s not always going to be vibrating. How to get there and then how to pull back so it’s not too overwhelming but to keep that ebb and flow going, the tides of the ocean.
Sofy: Shifting gears but connecting concepts -I’m curious if you could relate to your lived experience to questions of feminism or queerness or just all the political things that you might be dealing with or wanting to put in there. You make these incredibly grand amazing cosmic works that also touch on the material realities of life.
mayfield: Well i’m non-binary, and I see myself more as a non-binary feminine person, non-binary femme and what was exciting to me about studying the whales is that they’re largely matriarchal families. I was looking at sperm whales and how all of the female sperm whales stay together and they they take care of their young together. So when the young are developing and growing up one of the mothers will go down into the depths to get food and meanwhile the other whales maybe some of the older whales but also other female whales are teaching the young whales how to hunt, how to dive deep.
They don’t start off being able to go that deep and that to me was incredible. They have whale school for the kids, and it’s all the matriarchs, all the female whales. The male sperm whales they go pretty solo. Then this whole concept of echolocation is not a concept it’s an incredible physiological development in the whale that allows it to locate objects with sound and ensure survival. That to me felt more feminine than masculine with the sound having to travel through water and water being very feminine. So many aspects of the whales and their sensitivity but also their largeness.
They’re at the top of the food chain and they’re very important to the. E/earth and our ocean, the health of our oceans, and they are matriarchal societies. For me was really important to illuminate that
somehow at the end I think that you can get a sense of the matriarchal element. Then I dedicate the peace to my grandmother my great grandmother and I didn’t have their names, maybe all of my grandmothers and all of the grandmothers who are able to hold families together basically, and then in a more untraditional sense chosen mothers.
I feel one of my chosen mothers is an ancestor Marsha P Johnson. She was a black trans activist who ignited, or was one of the main activists who got involved with the Stonewall Riots. She was a poor black trans woman and she totally changed the world. She’s really a beacon for me and I have been writing her letters, I still write her letters every day. I created a piece called “Letters to Marcia” a couple years ago. I think that this continuation of looking at how can the more feminine aspects of
being on this planet guide us through this violent patriarchal system that we’ve been handed. How we can look at it from a different point of view to that story about the whales. The whale mother school. No one ever said that to me in biology class in elementary school and it’s because we have a predisposition to say:
the male whale hunts or whatever, solitary hunter. And ignore the society that’s behind them.
There’s a great book called Undrowned
[Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals.” Soundings 78.78 (2021): 20-37.] by Alexis Pauline
That book is really beautiful.
mayfield: Marsha P. Johnson is an important historical activist and character. A very specific time period, a very specific person. I didn’t visualise a historical diorama or something. It’s not directly in there but it’s in there very deeply.
With my work I’m always doing research, I’m always writing, I’m always rearranging objects, I’m always collecting objects. There’s this constant engagement with the work and for me if I’m in a creative process I let the creative process also speak to me. I don’t want to smother my own creative process so i’ll just collect things. Collect whatever is related to the work but what I want to preface this with actually is what this whole project was inspired by. Did you get to read the New York times article about the piece?
It’s an interview and I talk about how after the George Floyd uprisings I was really depressed. I struggle with depression, and I’m really starting to acknowledge that as a mental health issue. Not that it’s not a mental health issue and that I haven’t acknowledged it before, but now I’m acknowledging it more publicly and trying to give myself space to rest more as a more intentional thing. So I’m not just depressed about the fact that the uprisings are fizzling out but where’s this movement going and how can black people ever breathe in this country and just what’s the point? What’s the point of being here?
I came across these articles about whales that had been beached off the coast of Tasmania. It was 400 of them and how is that even possible? They couldn’t save a lot of them, and I just kept thinking with COVID happening (this was earlier during the COVID pandemic) how the bodies of these whales piling up just reminded me of black people’s bodies piling up because I remember how the largest percentage of numbers of people dying from COVID were either black or brown. I was like, this is really depressing. There’s something about these whale beachings that made me feel some of the grief that I had been feeling around the police killings and brutality and the continued backlash against the targeting of black folks, black youth, black women, black trans folks, black non-binary people.
The whales just seemed to be answering my prayer they were showing me something. So I started researching whales.
I’ve always been interested in decomposition because another job I’ve done alongside dancing has been urban farming. I started really taking ideas about decomposition and compost into my actual work as a
dancer and then I found out through my research about the Whalefall and about how whales, when they die they regenerate the ocean. All these creatures feed off of them and then when their bones get to the bottom of the sea they actually create entire ecosystems with their bones.
There are organisms that only feed off of the Whale Fall. How is that possible? So that to me was this grand metaphor. This is where I want to be in a more generative space, I want to be able to claim these kin as my kin, these whales as my kin and understand.
They’ve been doing the work, they’re taking the brunt of all our pollutants and our toxicity into their skin, they don’t even have a skin barrier. It’s just the blubber and once those toxins get into the whale’s blubber, that’s it. That’s the beginning of their contamination.
So I was like, this feels like the story of black folks. Then I got even deeper and started looking into the history of whaling and found that there were slave ships that were later used as whaling ships.
It was just wild, black people are whales somehow. In Alexis’s book she talks about that. She’s really amazing. So I think it turned political, because I have been going to the protests. I was mostly doing bike
protests because I ride my bike here in New York City. And they just fizzled out and it was just so amazing to come upon this story and then do more research and realize that yes, whales are in the abyss, but black people are in the abyss too, and how do we all start to understand or create a different being with each other that is more expansive through the auditory realm?
We depend on our vision so much, and it’s an over dependence. I think we don’t listen as much. There’s also so much noise pollution, so how can you listen? A lot of distractions.
So I think that’s the climate piece about the noise and how the noise affect the whales and how the petrol companies blast into the ocean. They do this sonar [blast] and it affects the whales and their ability to echolocate. So there’s all these layers.
The issues that I was really trying to grapple with, I wasn’t trying to put them in the piece, but it was all part of the research, and I hope that people can, when they see the work, start to be more mindful and aware of these creatures that are really really at risk right now and how that correlates with the history of the transatlantic slave trade and with the advent of modern capitalism and all the damage that’s done to all of us.
Sofy: There was this last piece, the oracle piece
From the website of the Center for Performance Research:
“The Whale Fall Oracle is an extraordinary seer “through bullshit.” Rates and fees vary.”
You can make an appointment here: https://www.improvisingwhileblack.com/contact
Sofy: I really love the mix of technology and oracle-ness in your work. One of the other womxn i’m interviewing goes by the name “the oracle” also.
But she has a very different take on what that is. It’s more an oracle of Delphi speaking in tongues through this cyberpunk aesthetic, I think it’s interesting that name resonates. You both have very different interpretations of it, but it’s still coming to us through the wires and through the sound of the telephone. She works a lot with cctv—she’ll do this spoken word movement piece with cameras looking at each other and parts of her speech and movement comes through them and then a projection or a dance with others dressed the same way as her. So both projects have this electronic transmission idea in them but they’re very different in every other way.
I think it’s really cool there’s two oracles in Brooklyn. At least two or three [Laughter]
From mayfield’s statement on the CPR website:
When I first made this work in April 2021, I wished I could be together with people in a theater. That wish has shifted into a desire to connect in and through absence. Whale Fall II is a study in absence. Entering the gallery at CPR – Center for Performance Research, the viewer is invited into spaces of habitation–a storefront psychic lounge, a handwritten poem, empty garments, an imaginary pop-up library–where the absence of the body speaks louder than its presence.
Sofy: it’s really amazing the way the specificity of the the issues and the people the historical people involved in your thoughts and the cosmic universal beyond merge. Are we even humans anymore?
mayfield: it took me out of my body and I think that’s extremely powerful.
Bio (provided by the artist):
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall, a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist and currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
brooks received a B.A. from Trinity College, an M.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and a M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. They also studied somatics and social change at Moving on Center: School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Research and contemporary dance at The School for New Dance Development in The Netherlands.
mayfield thanks their human and non human ancestors for watching over them and protecting them, and is grateful to have lived and danced with Indira C. Suganda (1966-2009) —their former dancer partner and creative soulmate.
