In 2019 as part of a project proposed for the FRQSC (The Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture, a Quebec-based funding agency that supports research in the social sciences, humanities, arts, and literature), entitled Against the Neutral Canvas: Corporeal Dramaturgy in Dance Creation and Performance, Prof. Angélique Willkie wrote:
"The dancer’s body is often thought of as an empty vessel for the creative input of the choreographer, yet many choreographic processes rely on the embodied improvisational responses of dancers to generate movement sequences, non-movement material for performance, and overall themes. Furthermore, the way that an audience reads bodies on stage is never neutral: race, gender, age, and movement style are just a few of the many aspects that affect how a dancer’s body is interpreted. My research-creation project seeks to rethink the body of the dancer as a political site of corporeal singularity and an active point of departure for creation, rather than merely an instrument for channeling the creativity of others."
This statement became the gardened landscape from which Murmurations emerged. That same year - just before the COVID pandemic - a research group coordinated by Willkie began to blossom, from within both the pandemic crisis and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The Dramaturgical Ecologies group was born: a research-creation collective that gathered to discuss and inquire into Blackness, dramaturgy, and embodied practices, at that time prompted by Willkie’s creative process as a performer, which culminated in her show Confession Publique.
Willkie, a Jamaican-born woman living in Quebec, after a long European performance career, became, in her own words, “keenly aware of the influences of sociocultural and political colonialism both on people’s perceptions of myself and on my own perceptions of myself.” Her racialized identity took on different nuances depending on the context, so that she was expected to be not just “neutral,” but an ambiguous shape-shifter as well.
From the gatherings and reflections around Willkie’s creative process, a refrain arose: “Blackness as a lens to think dramaturgy.”
"The lens of Blackness allows me to begin recognizing certain manifestations in my practice, in my embodiedness. Blackness is a lens through which we see that—it’s a way of understanding and articulating my embodied dramaturgy. Not in the sense of imposing it, but understanding it as a component of, and the angle through which, we explore dramaturgy. "
From these research-creation landscapes, engaged with the refrain Blackness as a lens…, the Murmurations suite of outreach activities blossomed as a SSHRC Connection Grant project (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funds, targeted knowledge mobilization events and outreach activities, like workshops, conferences, and community engagement initiatives). Murmurations became a twelve-month process centered on the interrelation of the conceptual pillars of Blackness and Dramaturgy.
The overarching goal of the proposed activities was to gather, activate, and share the outcomes of three years of the Dramaturgical Ecologies research group led by Willkie as Principal Investigator.
A year-long series of outreach activities took place in the form of moderated dialogues with artists, practitioners, and scholars, facilitated by the team of graduate students and other collaborators under Willkie’s mentorship. These conversations invited reflections on the ecologies of dramaturgical processes. An artistic residency also took place, focusing on how the concepts of Blackness and Dramaturgy productively rub up against one another - always informed by Willkie’s own practices as dance dramaturg and performer.
Blackness, here, emerged as the processes of embodiment and identification possessed by and imposed upon those of African or Afro-diasporic origin. Dramaturgy refers to the process of gathering the physical, material, and creative elements of a performance work according to a logic that is itself emergent.
Amid Murmurations, another refrain arose through years of exchanges, interviews, and readings - before and during the project: okra as a recurring theme, a conceptual operator that helped us moving along the non-representational aspects of our research-creation process.
Choreographic - choreOKRAtic - Ecologies.