Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty performance artworks worldwide including Black Weirdo School (Pop Up Critique) (2023), the déjà vu—live (2022) and Jupiter (2021). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), (ghost gestures) (2021), the déjà vu (2022) and In & Out of Place (2024). Her writing has also appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, Migrating Pedagogies, DanceNotes, and Experiments in Joy: a Workbook. A 2023 Franconia Performance Fellow, she earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, among others. They make art and write about race, gender, and moving bodies; and support coalition movements committed to repair and transformation.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:

Black Motion Pictures [excerpt]

00:24:06.510 --> 00:24:08.370
Gabrielle Civil: Yes. If you are in riot gear... And you are billy
clubbing, and you are tear gassing; you have forgotten something about
being in your own body.

00:24:16.080 --> 00:24:23.580
Gabrielle Civil: Like what’s happening for you in that moment? Have you
become a machine or what? Who are you, what’s going on?

. . .

00:26:45.360 --> 00:26:50.670
Gabrielle Civil: But see, to me, this is my romantic side. I do think
performance is...different.

00:27:18.570 --> 00:27:30.870
Gabrielle Civil: Something about embodying in time and space... I just am
really still in love with the potential of that, you know?

00:27:30.930 --> 00:27:32.910
Anna Martine Whitehead: Yeah, I mean I like what you’re saying...

00:28:41.160 --> 00:28:52.410
Anna Martine Whitehead: ...how being in a practice of being, learning, and
doing with your body, making meaning with your body, how that can kind of
shift the relationship to time...

00:29:34.260 --> 00:29:39.120
Gabrielle Civil: So, what we’re talking about now is pace and how some
people can get to something, learn the steps, or do them faster or slower.

00:29:39.660 --> 00:29:43.470
Gabrielle Civil: And we’re in a moment; we’re still in this first week of
June, which is super intense in 2020...

00:29:43.740 --> 00:29:53.250
Gabrielle Civil: ...where I think a lot of Black and Brown people are
impatient, because it’s like, we’ve been at a place for a long time, and
it’s like catch up.

00:29:54.330 --> 00:29:56.250
Gabrielle Civil: You don’t even need to make your body move in the same
step as ours, but you need to get here, you need to get closer to here
faster, like yesterday.

00:30:06.750 --> 00:30:07.200
Anne Martine Whitehead: Yeah.

More from Gabrielle Civil and Black Motion Pictures:

Artist Reflection

Perhaps no other medium of communication represents the pandemic moment better than Zoom, as everything from remote work to political organizing to poetry readings to family meetings and wedding celebrations switched over to this internet video conference platform. On Zoom, my interviews for Black Motion Pictures were both intimate one-on-one affairs and displaced virtual encounters. While the resulting Zoom videos highlight resilient Black sociality, the Zoom interview transcripts arrive as curious documents full of time signatures, ellipses, erratic capitalization, and relentless repetition of speaker names. Rather than smooth this all over, many of these elements remain preserved in this excerpt. For me, this idiosyncratic, hybrid style becomes a fitting testament to how deeply mediated we were by technology and the glitchy strangeness of the time. 

May new hybrid forms of Black performance dreams continue to arrive . . .