The Invisible City Project Curatorial Statement
Deborah Goffe, Curator
I. Point of Reference
All that confidence in continuous traditions and innocent encounters with pristine cultures has been shattered in our post-colonial epoch. Borders bleed, as much as they contain. Instead of dividing lines to be patrolled or transgressed, boundaries are now understood as crisscrossing sites inside the post-modern subject. Difference is resituated within, instead of beyond, the self. Inside and outside distinctions, like genres, blur and wobble (Conquergood 184). “
If place is home, and home is where the body is, then can we conclude that place is located or carried in the body? For me, this question was stirred by two journeys across the Atlantic several years ago. Over the course of 2 summers, in 2007 and 2008, I spent a total of 3 months on the island of Santiago in the Republic of Cape Verde, an archipelago 350 miles off the west coast of Africa. As I learned about the country during my initial visit, it seemed the history of the modern world converged on these tiny volcanic masses sprinkled in the Atlantic Ocean. Over hundreds of years, its colonization by the Portuguese to serve the early development of the transatlantic slave trade, the racial mix of its population, its devastating cycle of drought, and the impact of prolonged migration had informed every aspect of the country and its people. To be Cape Verdean, it seemed, was to be fundamentally hybridized—racially, musically, kinesthetically, linguistically, historically, socially and politically. And while the people certainly harbored their share of existential crises around the contributing sources of this hybridization, the Cape Verdeans I encountered took a deeply moving pride in their resulting cultural identity.
As I struggled to negotiate day to day social contracts in Cape Verde, I could not deny that I am a product of my time and place. And as weeks passed, I could not deny that my relationship to time and place was changing as Cape Verde seeped in. While there, I worked closely with Mano Preto, a Cape Verdean dance maker and Artistic Director of Raiz di Polon, a contemporary dance company based in the capital city of Praia. Mano’s artistic work demonstrated both a compelling relationship to place and an artful suspension between tradition and contemporaneity that was far more relevant than the somewhat fossilized Africa I had been guilty of anticipating when I arrived. And as I encountered more and more of Cape Verdean culture, I began to recognize Cape Verde’s threads of deep social engagement, fluid passage of time, porous physical boundaries, and poetic nostalgia running through Mano’s work to give it its distinct cadence and tone. I could see these influences playing out in his works, even as he deconstructed and reassembled a wide variety of elements through his choreographic experiments. One Cape Verdean scholar proposed the existence of cultural DNA, suggesting culture could be engrained at a cellular level. It made me wonder how something of my own place existed as seeds taking root and flowering in me. And since leaving Cape Verde it seems I carried something of that place home with me as well. The experience forced me to consider the ways place is embodied, and the ways that embodiment manifests in ones’ artistic expression?
(for more on my experience of place, context and contemporaneity in Cape Verde … )
II. Home: auto-ethnography
Things too close to us can be handled, smelled, and tasted, but they cannot be seen—at least not clearly. Natives are at home, steeped in their place’s ambience, but the instant they think about the place it turns into an object of thought “out there.” Thinking creates distance. Tourists seek out new places. In a new setting they are forced to see and think without the support of a whole world of known sights, sounds and smells—largely unacknowledged—that give weight to being … (Tuan 146).”
I was recently asked what I loved about Hartford, the city of my birth and where I have lived as an adult for the last 10 years. The answer seemed to come quickly, “I love the invisible things.” A few short years ago, I learned that a river once flowed through the city, right through its downtown and branching out in tributaries to surrounding towns. Over the course of the 1940s, in response to a pattern of severe flooding, the Army Corp of Engineers buried the river. Now 9 miles of river flows beneath the city in vast tunnels. There is something powerful in this new awareness of the buried Park River flowing beneath our feet. I can’t help but imagine its path as I traverse the city streets and wonder how this invisible force once shaped the cityscape I now know. Like the river, an invisible Hartford exists beneath the surface. Its history, its shunned neighborhoods, its marginalized populations, and its insistent artist community epitomizes a world unseen by most.
This issue of invisibility was aptly illustrated in Mel Chin’s public art work, Ghost, commissioned by Real Art Ways, the alternative art space, in 1991. Ghost suggested the façade of Hartford’s first black church in the exact place it was built on Talcott Street more than a century earlier, but where it had not stood for nearly 50 years. In Chin’s work that sacred ground, now an office building, was merely indicated with a wood frame, mesh, chalk outline, and stone steps. Chin imposed a gentle intervention that revealed an invisible reality, a residue from the past. As Yi-Fu Tuan suggests, it is difficult to see what we are closest to. With a little distance comes perspective, a measure of objectivity … and the risk of disconnect. Like a wide angle lens, Chin’s Ghost superimposed the past onto the present, creating just enough distance for passersby to notice what was always there.
III. Two Lines of Inquiry
Ethnography’s distinctive research methods … privileges the body as a site of knowing. … [T]he obligatory rite-of-passage for all ethnographers—doing fieldwork—requires getting one’s body immersed in the field for a period of time sufficient to enable one to participate inside that culture. Ethnography is an embodied practice; it is an intensely sensuous way of knowing. The embodied researcher is the instrument (Conquergood 180).
In recent years, much has been said about the notion of placemaking. As American cities that were born or brought to maturity through industrialization seek new impetus to propel growth and prosperity, municipalities are acknowledging the correlations between cultural and economic vitality. As a result, the efficacy of arts endeavors are often based on the ability to directly correlate cultural product to economic development. And while the role of economics in the sustainability of both communities and artists cannot be overlooked, I wonder what may be gained by mining place, rather than attempting to make place, or impose a contrived, idealized notion of place. Attempting to make place is one thing, embodying place is quite another.
This notion of embodied place has particular resonance for me as I begin to trace the presence of contemporary performance practice in and around Hartford. In this tracing, a legacy begins to emerge of area artists who have cultivated the body’s expressive powers. What of the place is made evident in the work of these artists and what do they share in common? Characteristics specific to a region are probably more difficult to identify than ever before as our global and technological connectedness allow influences to embed themselves across geographic borders with ease. However, just as Cape Verde’s invisible qualities could be experienced in its contemporary works of art, even as its traditional forms continue to absorb the world, perhaps something significant can be learned about Hartford and its people by examining the work of its artists in the bodies of its artists. Hartford itself is a city between, informed as much by complicated histories, economies, proximities, and social constructs as any other city. It is, as a result, as deserving as any other place to have an ethnographer’s lens turned on it, and to be brought into dialogue with itself and its geographic offspring in other cities.
What if Hartford was viewed through an ethnographic lens, uncovering how the convergence of its history, diverse populations, economic disparity, proximity to established cultural centers, and its tension between risk aversion and innovation inform its cultural expression? What if Hartford embraced its Hartford-ness and cultivated its sense of place from this self-knowledge? What if this sense of place was located in the body and traced through the embodied practice of artists who have called the region home?
In this investigation, two lines of inquiry emerge in the work of (1.) local emerging dance artists and (2.) those who spent formative years in Hartford but now live and work as dance artists elsewhere. While there are many artists who fall into one of these two categories, my personal experience with Hartford’s dance community brings two Greater Hartford natives to the forefront as particularly representative of these areas.
- Jolet Creary, a native of Hartford’s north end, roots herself in a theatricalized urban aesthetic informed by Hip Hop, Modern Dance, Ballet, Lindy Hop and African Dance.
- Hilary Clark, who grew up in one of Hartford’s suburbs and attended the Greater Hartford Academy of Performing Arts, now makes her own choreographic work while performing in the works of some of the country’s most innovative performance makers: Tere O’Connor, Miguel Gutierrez, Luciana Achugar and Young Jean Lee.
Both artists and their work are informed by specific characteristics of their generations, training, current environments, and particular aesthetic preferences. Yet Creary and Clark are inevitably bound by their relationships to the place—Hartford—and to contemporary performance practice. By examining their work, and the work of other artists tied to the city, past or present, a deepened sense of place may unfold before us.
IV. Intimate Exchange
Intimate occasions are often those on which we become passive and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, exposed to the caress or sting of new experience. … Intimate places are places of nurture where our fundamental needs are heeded and cared for without fuss. … Home is an intimate place. … Hometown is an intimate place (Tuan 137- 144).”
Through The Invisible City Project, the intimate environment of The Garden Center will serve as a central meeting place where artists and audiences will be invited to intimately experience the art of dance, and where dialogue around this notion of embodied place is provoked. This investigation is driven by lofty goals: for the art of performance to provide a deep grounding in place—this place—thus elevating the status of dance artists and the spirits of the city. Of course, taking responsibility for the elevated spirits of Hartford as a whole may be beyond the reach of a mere season of dance programming, but as I mused with Hilary Clark about Hartford and the struggle to cultivate a flow between her past and present experiences of home, she shared the following sentiment:
I have this very personal and bittersweet feeling about Hartford. … I’ve always had this desire to come back and be a resource, but … there was a formality. So I stopped trying. … I would’ve liked to have had more connection to Hartford. If there was somewhere to connect, a touchstone, I would. … There has to be a meeting place—a place where work can be seen, ideas can be exchanged, and thoughts can be provoked. Hopefully people will understand that engaging with each other this way is what creates community (Clark).”
Whether here in the thick of it or from distant locales, I have shared Clark’s sentiments, and her desire for sustained connection to home. The Garden Center is positioned to serve as connective tissue—linking local dance artists to each other, essential resources, extended networks within the field, and to members of the local community at large who may now claim the work of these artists as their own in a meaningful way. Perhaps art offers the possibility of reconciliation. Here again, Tuan validates this hope:
In large measure, culture dictates the focus and range of our awareness. … Art makes images of feeling so that feeling is accessible to contemplation and thought. … Here is a seeming paradox: thought creates distance and destroys the immediacy of direct experience, yet it is by thoughtful reflection that the elusive moment of the past draw near to us in present reality and gain a measure of permanence (Tuan 148).”
Works Cited
Clark, Hilary. Personal Interview. 3 March 2013.
Conquergood, Dwight. “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.” Communication Monographs 58 (1991):179-194. Web. 25 Jan. 2013.
Hammersly, Martyn and Paul Atkinson. Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Print
