Performance stills from [siccer], performed at The Momentary, Bentonville, AR, 2023.

Will Rawls
[siccer], 2023
performance, installation, and video

“[siccer] mobilizes stop motion and the materiality of film production to consider how black gestures become captured, fixed, and perhaps undone. Through choreographic and sonic experimentation, the performers examine and explode the conventions of genre—visual, sonic, and gestural—that both constrain and make blackness legible.” –Kemi Adeyemi

The project’s title is driven by the Latin adverb “[sic],” which indicates incorrect spelling within a quotation and which is often employed to contrast black vernacular speech with standard English. Rawls turns this conflict on its head in order to illuminate the verbal and physical play of black performance as something that eludes capture on screen and in language—and that speculates on the potential of strategies for narrating the world, uncorrected.

[siccer] was co-comissioned by The Momentary, Bentonville, AR; MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; and The Kitchen, New York, NY.

Performance stills from Everlasting Stranger, performed at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, 2021.

Will Rawls
Everlasting Stranger, 2021
performance, installation, sculpture, and video

In Everlasting Stranger, Rawls activates relationships between language, dance, and image through the fragmentary medium of stop motion animation. In this installation, time and movement slow as a live, automated camera photographs the frame-by-frame actions of four dancers. While the performers occupy the labor of becoming images, visual capture is staged as an obsessive process that is constant yet compromised by the movement it aims to fix. Here, as in previous works, Rawls develops strategies of evasion and engagement within systems that mediate, distort, and abstract the body.

Rawls’s exhibition takes inspiration from the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and his surrealist novel The Infinite Rehearsal (1987). In the book, the constrictive projections of the colonial gaze manifest as a child’s fever dream where ghosts reinterpret time, geneaology, and identity as unstable matter. Harris’ novel serves as a conduit through which Rawls addresses the misrepresentation that haunts all forms of capture, including photography and choreography. Within the temporal delerium that marks existence in quarantine, Rawls animates the life that appears between frames.

Everlasting Stranger was produced in collaboration between Henry Art Gallery and Velocity Dance Center, both Seattle, WA; and organized by Nina Bozicnik, Henry Curator, and Erin Johnson, Velocity Interim Artistic and Managing Director.

Performance stills from Uncle Rebus at the High Line, New York, NY, 2018.

Will Rawls
Uncle Rebus, 2018
performance, installation, and poems

Uncle Rebus is a choreographed meditation on Uncle Remus, the fictional narrator of the Southern folklore compilation, Brer Rabbit Tales. Invented by white Southern folklorist and author, Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus was a composite identity based on Harris’s account of African-American oral cultures on the plantations where Harris served as an apprentice. Manipulating a large-scale keyboard composed of removable letters, the dancers spell out a long-form story, destabilizing the fictional dialects of Harris’s imagination, further exploring the limits of linguistic sense and written speech.

Uncle Rebus was commissioned by the High Line, New York, NY. It was performed at the High Line July 10, 11, and 12, 2018.

Performance stills from What Remains at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2018.

Will Rawls
What Remains, 2018
performance

In this collaboration with poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine, Will Rawls invites us across the threshold of a historical void, using movement and language to create an immersive environment from the idea of an entombed imagination, and responding to violence and disappearance with a resonant, ghostly chorus. 

What Remains premiered at the Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, in 2017 and has been presented at Danspace Project (in partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française as part of the Crossing The Line Festival), New York, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA.

Performance stills from I make me [sic], at MoMA PS1, New York, NY, 2016.

Will Rawls
I make me [sic], 2016
performance

I make me [sic] is a solo choreography adapted continually as an installation. Using the alphabet as a loose structure, Rawls spins out short lectures and other performance material culled from a life history of dance, consumption, and self-definition. The nonlinear and live composition of movement, objects, sound, and text produce an attenuated sense of time and situation, sparking the potential for a body to claim its rights as a work-in-progress, while tugging subtly at the institutional and architectural framework that holds it.

I make me [sic] premiered at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition, New York, NY; and subsequently performed at The Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR.