Areneshuia Nelson photographed by Sierra King at Yes Please bookhouse and carespace

Untitled

A conversation between Sierra King and Anicka Austin will present the process of collaborative work, world-building, and the investigation of archival records that was conducted to produce the dance-based work-in-progress, Untitled. From the research conducted at Emory University’s Rose Library to the Group Performance at Auburn Avenue Research Library both Artists and Archivists, Sierra King and Anicka Austin, expanded modalities within their practices that mirrored the memic devices and stream-of-consciousness.

It provided an experience for both the community and performers to express movement in unconventional spaces as a vehicle toward freedom. 

Untitled is a dance-based project activated by Atlanta’s archival material and institutions. Archives from the Lucille Clifton papers; Carmen de Lavallade papers; and Katherine Dunham collection at Emory University’s Rose Library will be used to create a speculative embodied narrative of Clifton, de Lavallade, and Dunham’s lives. The project aimed to elucidate the archive as a source for meditation on the interior worlds of Black women artists. Artists and archivists, Sierra King and Anicka Austin led a community of dancers, musicians, and documentarians to explore an ecstatic dance in the historical district of Auburn Avenue and the third spaces of For Keeps Rare Books, and yes please bookhouse and carespace. 

Over two months, Sierra and Anicka conducted weekly research meetings and readings at Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library. It was there they investigated Lucille Clifton’s journals, Carmen deLavallede’s choreographic drawings of movements, and Kathrine’s extensive documentation of her dance practices that they began to continue to return to the common throughline of repetition as the expression of the passage of time. The research and discussions led to a speculative narrative of coming together for an ecstatic dance party where their lives, movements, thoughts, and memories collided.