This exposition is an archival gesture emerging from the Dramaturgical Ecologies research-creation collective. Rooted in the entwined inquiries of Blacknesses and Dramaturgy, it gathers the dialogues, encounters and an artistic residency that unfolded through the SSHRC-funded Murmurations project.

Between the viscous resonance of okra and the shifting flight of murmuring birds, the exposition shares choreokratic ecologies - a garden of study where movement, thought, and relation co-compose. Here, Blackness becomes a method, a lens, a refrain, challenging the neutrality of the performer-dancer body and inviting modes of collective creation that are relational, porous, and opaque. Murmurations attends to what forms in the formless - like a swarm of birds: a living archive of bodies, voices, and ecologies composing a landscape.

… we encountered okra and tentatively staged it. We encountered okra in the fields of provision grounds, but okra also fielded us, our practices, researches, events. The fields of okra, before the Murmurations, were the dialogues around Blackness and Dance Dramaturgy, informed by Angelique Willkie's emergent research-creation practices. Okra, with its shapes, geometries and rich historicities, lended itself as a conduit for ideas and inquiries that cannot fit into representational frames. Questions on Blackness, race, identities, positionality, dance dramaturgy, performance and research-creation. Fields of okra emerged while it fielded and staged experimentations informed by the spirits of A Conversation on Formless Formation (Harney, Moten, Ruiz, Vourlomis, 2021), where bird flocks and murmurations encountered okra.

This exposition attempts an archival gesturing for the outreach events that took place in 2022. A storytelling, but also a choreokratic garden, with its harvests: the multiplicity of themes that emerged in the series of conversations, encounters, facilitated readings, and practices that were shared before and after the series of outreach events.