June

1. Performance

   whale fall abyss•whale fall reckoning
   

   Project Description

   Choreographer mayfield brooks presents two works: an intimate performance in the Tall Ship Wavertree at the South Street Seaport Museum and a durational multimedia dance installation at the Arts Center’s Upper Gallery.  whale fall abyss occurs in the cargo hold of the Wavertree tall ship calling up ghosts and ancestors  from the intersecting histories of whalers and slave ships, while whale fall reckoning conjures an abyssal underwater world transforming the formerly munitions storage warehouse into an imagined site of the decomposed whale with found objects, sound, light, movement and projection.   

   Both presentations are a culmination of brooks’ project, Whale Fall, originally commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and virtually premiered as an experimental dance film in 2021 during the height of the Covid-19 epidemic. When Whale Fall (the film) premiered brooks wrote, “This project was born out of a desire to sit with grief and rage in a world that discards too much and consumes too much. As a result, the bodies of whales and the bodies of Black folk seem to have a kinship in how they have been both targeted, hunted and consumed since the transatlantic slave trade. I have also come to know that some slave ships were used as whaling vessels.” In this present moment of continued environmental destruction caused by war and accelerated global warming, brooks is asking, “What light reaches us? What darkness welcomes the reckoning?” 

2. Research

   In scientific terms, a whale fall describes the process of a whale’s decomposition after it dies and falls to the ocean floor, where it provides vital nutrients for the ocean and other marine life. 

   I would like to continue my work with whales and decomposition for the Guggenheim Fellowship and embark on an expedition that decomposes the concept of dance as performance. What if dance was an expedition that followed humpback whales from Antarctica to Colombia in the south and endangered North Atlantic Right Whales from Canada to the Southern United States in the North?  What if the migration and movement patterns of Humpback whales and endangered North Atlantic Right Whales choreographed the work? In my proposed project, The Choreography of Whales, I investigate the possibility of interspecies choreography, social migratory choreography, and climate change as choreography. Are whales already determining our movements and we theirs in this era of rapid global warming? I envision the project in three parts: choreography, expedition and community engagement. 

3. Community Engagement

   Last year, I was granted the Hodder Fellowship through Princeton University and with my research funds, I decided to travel to Colombia’s Pacific Coast and observe the Afro Colombian community’s relationship to whales.  Since August 18th, I have been traveling primarily in Chocó on the Pacific Coast of Colombia, observing, researching, and participating in whale ecotourism. As I write this statement of plans, my trip in Colombia is coming to a close. One of my Whale Fall collaborators is Colombian, and has served as my interpreter and guide. On this trip, I experienced ecotourism as a contradictory venture. It is more transactional than community building. This is the reason why I am inspired to use part of the Guggenheim fellowship funds to go on a physical journey from Antarctica to the Pacific Coast of Colombia and build community by sharing this experience with the friends I made in the small village of Arusí, in the Nuquí area of Chocó. While staying there, my collaborator/guide Camilo and I were invited to share and exchange dance with a large group of children, whose thirst for dance also influenced my desire to pursue this project. I am excited to turn this into an educational and artistic bilingual dance project that the children can learn in their schools and community. The Choreography of Whales project is deeply entwined with my experience in Arusí.

4. Climate Justice

   After four years of rigorous research and numerous iterations, brooks’ ever evolving project Whale Fall continues to decompose itself. This iteration lives as a call to the wild parts of ourselves, a denouement to complacent attitudes towards death and decay. How are we  entangled in the ruse of romance with our compulsion to consume and our dependence on war machines? Why do we continue to kill?  How can the whale fall reorient us to face our own mortality and the death of our planet earth with more compassion?  brooks considers the whale fall as a reckoning. They imagine their ancestor’s bones mingling with whale bones beckoning us to embrace interspecies care and relation beyond the human. Perhaps we can save the whales, ourselves, and the planet if we simply decompose.

Our adventure has been a spiritual and creative encounter, we met in 2022 dancing and our union with this project began in a deep connection with a sperm whale that we found stranded in Rockaway Beach, NY.

Whale fall project has entered this journey where we share our love for the ocean, for creating and for movement.

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(normally we are a pod of three…)