Creative-Research Statement
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Black queer studies | Architecture of Performance | Postdramatic theory | Postmodern Aesthetics
My research focuses on avant-garde performance and contemporary theatre as well as critical discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and class. This research was developed in my M.A. thesis as an investigation of the performance turn in postdramatic theory and the existence of certain jazz aesthetics in dramatic texts. I have formulated a Black queer architecture of performance in my Master of Fine Arts studies in European Devised Performance at the Arthaus Berlin International Centre in partnership with Columbia College Chicago. I use this kaleidoscope of “European” performance methodologies (which I find to be Asian, African, and Latin American) as a counterpoint to my Black music aesthetic research in theatre studies which has brought out a global and postcolonial engagement in my critical and creative work.
M.F.A. Devised Performance Practice, Columbia College Chicago, 2020
M.A. Theatre Studies, University of Central Florida, 2021
B.F.A. Musical Theatre, Sam Houston State University, 2008
CREATIVE PROCESS: nonlinear | embodied | laboratory-based
“My creative process is nonlinear, body-centric, and laboratory-based. The work is nonlinear in that I use many voices/spirits that are speaking in my life at any given moment to engage in a creative and critical conversation. When I label and specify particular voices, I call them “points of departure.” For the embodied researcher, points of departure represent an infinite possibility of questions, be it personal, historical, or theoretical. Part of the artist’s job is to follow curiosity, wonder, and serendipity to uncover the questions hidden by the answers. A point of departure is any starting point from which a creative process can begin: a movement quality, any object or scenario, qualities in a painting, the flow of a piece of music, etc. In my work, several points of departure are being developed at any given moment in what I call études, or embodied studies. I give each étude a title, set it aside, and then work with another point of departure. At a certain moment, I begin to see associations and patterns among the fragments. I follow the strongest impulse to synthesize these fragments in order to discover some new dissonance or juxtaposition relevant to the current project. This nonlinearity often expresses itself in my work as collage, or montage. Weaving together actions, materials, and/or fragments into a new synthesis, I attempt to capture the essence of the question(s) with which I am wrestling, both through the process and performance.
As an artist-scholar, I center the body by remaining engaged with many critical discourses that resonate or clash in relationship to my Black queer body. The practice of embodied performance is a way of knowledge, insight, and clarity for me. I rely on a philosophy of embodiment that affirms: “the body knows.” Embodied practices center, as Della Pollock would say, “living bodies of thought” (2006: 7). My body is discourse—a way of thinking; it is a point of tension between myself and other bodies—myself and the world. Therefore, I center embodiment by trans-posing a point of departure and its questions through the body, making the invisible visible in a call and response dynamic. I transform a call (or question) into a body-answer (or response). For instance, if I am investigating a texture in a painting, I might contemplate through movement by asking, “What is the essence of that texture in and through movement? How does it feel in my body, and what does it make me want to do?” I perform this call and response with my whole body, and then I write down some action verbs that describe the trans-position.
Improvisation is central to my process of trans-posing a point of departure through the body. I lean heavily on four principles of improvisation: the principle of Rep & Rev, accumulation, amplification, and essentialization. I use Suzan-Lori Parks’s understanding of the jazz aesthetic Rep & Rev (i.e. Repetition and Revision), which is the “literal incorporation of the past” represented in African diasporic literary and oral traditions but transposed into the context of body, movement, and performance (1995: 10). Using the principle of Rep & Rev, I take an initial movement impulse and repeat it until something else arises. This “something” is often simply a “mis-take” in the repetition, or it could be the associative impulse to add to or subtract from the initial movement. Repetition intends to remember where we came from—the original impulse, or at least something close to it. Revision intends to remember a movement impulse into a different orientation or configuration. The principle of accumulation is when one repeats a movement or gesture until the mover is satisfied enough to simply add to it until a series of movements/gestures is accumulated. This forms a movement score that the mover can improvise more freely around by changing the order to tell a different movement story and/or choose to transpose another quality or principle onto the movement score all together. Amplification and essentialization are two principles I often transpose into a movement score in order to extract more information about the poetics of the movement. Amplification seeks to expand or heighten the movement or gesture (in tempo, size, density, etc.), while essentialization seeks to strip the movement down to its most simple yet condensed expression. These principles represent a small sample of the diverse ways of improvising with qualities of movement and can become points of departure in and of themselves.
Finally, I consider my process laboratory-based because “the spirit of the studio,” rather than the writing desk, is my primary field of research and creation. “Laboratory” has an etymological meaning emphasizing a regular practice (labor) that is necessary to any process of embodiment and a spiritual dimension of prayer (i.e. oratory) to creative and intellectual ancestors who guide my process. Laboratory also means that there is a deliberate oscillation between beginning with a question (experimentation) and letting that question go (exploration), trusting that the body knowledge has information the analytical mind may not be able to access. Being laboratorial in nature, my devised work follows Eugenio Barba’s Theatre Anthropology which seeks to explore “recurrent principles” like I have mentioned above that are found in performances around the world (2005: 7). Other principles include but are not limited to: slow motion, opposition/push and pull, fall and recovery, accumulation, and equivalence. My use of these principles extends this tradition of historically European theatre laboratory research into a global performance practice by trans-posing certain Black and queer aesthetics through the body, particularly from visual art, poetry, dance, and music.”
Excerpt from:
Wood, Johann Robert. “Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice.” In Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation. eds. Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerson. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2021.