Abstract
Choreographer Ligia Lewis's first video-based piece, deader than dead (2021) was initially conceived as a performance to be staged in the Los Angeles Hammer Museum but was translated to video when the COVID-19 pandemic closed museums for in-person viewing. The piece deploys split frames that display different video channels, embracing a multiplicity of viewpoints. Lewis uses cinema's mobile frame to unfastens the fixed viewpoint of theatrical performance and explore “corpsing” (when falling out of a role exposes the limits of performance) as an indictment of the condition of black social death. Inspired by David Marriott's essay on “corpsing,” deader than dead's “falling out of character” (Lewis's dancers literally fall to the floor, find themselves revived, and then fall again) revels in and reveals the repeated performance of black life as death to be both the foundation and fate of the contemporary world. This article leans on Jordan Peele's Get Out (2016), one of Lewis's favorite horror films, and the use of dance in his later Us (2019) to illuminate how deader than dead locates and exploits the fugitivity of bad faith, particularly the bad faith of antiracist gestures that perpetuate social foundations of antiblackness. At the same time, viewing deader than dead through Sybil Newton Cooksey's concept of “revenant motion” helps clarify how Lewis deploys uncanny animation that ruptures the continuity of performances of racial equality acted out over a reality of social life predicated on antiblackness.
Initially conceived as a live exhibition for a “dead space” (i.e., overlooked and routinely passed through) of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Ligia Lewis translated her 2020 dance piece deader than dead to video when the COVID-19 pandemic closed museums and made in-person performance impossible. As a video, deader than dead unfastens the fixed viewpoint of live theatrical performance and embraces the multiple vantages afforded by cinema's mobile frame to continuously adjust our visual perspective on three dancers that perform a series of meditations on death, each designated with its own soundtrack. These meditations begin with the dancers slowly being pulled to life: the dancer in the foreground robotically stirs, appearing, to his own surprise, pulled into a shuffling movement first in one direction and then the other, while two performers in the background remain in the still pose of collapsed puppets, ready to be animated by invisible hands (fig. 1).
Once the performer in the foreground yells “Off” and the sounds of Guillaume de Machaut's “Complainte: Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure (Le remède de Fortune)” (ca. 1340s) fill the scene, the single screen splits into four frames, one of which shows the background performers collapsing (fig. 2, video 1). In what follows, the dancers are animated, collapse, and are reanimated, move and are moved by the beats of a techno danse macabre, revive, drag, and assemble one another as corpse-like figures only to come to life again. Their performance is mediated by mobile cameras whose feed is at times distributed between two or up to four screens at once.
Excerpt from deader than dead (Ligia Lewis, 2021).
In a Q&A with scholar Mlondi Zondi that accompanied deader than dead's livestream premiere on February 21, 2021, Lewis describes the work as “kind of a meditation on death and what otherwise feels like a condition of bad faith/bad fate . . . articulated with dark humor through the logic of corpsing.”1 As Lewis puts it, corpsing is when you “fall out of character, out of representation.”2 Here she is referring to David Marriott's 2016 article “Corpsing: or, The Matter of Black Life,” which explains the theatrical meaning of corpsing as a verb that “signifies a blunder occurring when, in accordance with the performance of a role, an actor is ‘put out’ of his part. A role that is corpsed . . . exposes the limits of performance and . . . denotes the ‘death’ of theater, as theater.”3 Marriott applies corpsing as a metaphor to the performance of “black social death” under the “command of social laws,” positing that corpsing might function as a “ ‘death’ of ‘death,’ so to speak.”4
While “bad faith” describes the way nominally liberal and postracial societies are still suffused by antiblack racism, “bad fate” is precisely the outcome of this unacknowledged condition. As a performance of “falling out” of character, therefore, corpsing is a theatrical technique/attitude/disposition that can be applied to both the deliberate performance of social death and to bad-faith performances of antiracism that foster, while denying it, a dependence upon that very death. The extensive list of theoretical and artistic references in Lewis's piece, which range from the films of Carmelo Bene to Macbeth, share motifs of repetition that expose the sinister mechanics of bad faith by corpsing the performative sincerity of promises, gestures, and acts, which, if made in good faith would be singular and final. In my discussion of these references, I pay particular attention to the work of filmmaker Jordan Peele, the director of Lewis's favorite horror movie, Get Out (2017). Get Out and Peele's second feature, Us (2021), are kindred spirits to deader than dead, as, like Peele, Lewis's work examines bad faith in the context of contemporary white liberalism and antiracism, while interrogating how audiovisual recording technologies construct racialized narratives and positions (through genre cinema, video art, camera phones, surveillance footage, etc.). Crucially, Lewis, like Peele, draws attention in her work to the underlying impossibility of film/ video's inherent promise to capture everything, locating within this impossibility not only an extension of the bad faith of antiracist gestures and movements that both she and Peele excoriate, but also a site of fugitivity where black subjectivity might escape its own overdetermination by such media. While Peele's films are not always dance performances, the central role of fugitive movement in these films (whether it be the escape from the Armitages’ basement in Get Out or the climactic final dance-off in Us), similarly to Lewis's, capitalizes on fugitivity as an ironic quality of bad faith and, as a result, helps illuminate the many ways—particularly in our “postracial” moment—to play “deader than dead.”
To do something in bad faith, or even to exercise existential bad faith, as defined by Jean-Paul Sartre, involves the performance of wanting or believing something while actively or passively pursuing its opposite. For bad faith to work, it must be capable of endless dissimulations—here understood as fugitivity, broadly construed—that define its very “badness”: for instance, the bad faith of the slogan “Black Lives Matter” in a context where the absurd repetition of black death suggests that they do not. The counterprotest slogan, “All Lives Matter,” doubles down on the fugitive sincerity of the original slogan's meaning, capitalizing on that slipperiness by preposterously taking the original slogan to task, again in bad faith, for proposing that if “black lives matter” other lives do not. The matter of black life and death at work in such slogans materializes through the embodiment of the dancers in deader than dead as they interrogate the performativity upon which bad faith depends and the utility of the fugitive elements of performance that emerge between image and reality as the dancers’ bodies often evade video capture. Lewis's choreography and use of split screen locate the slippery fugitivity of the bad faith of a society that persists in assigning a role of black death to subjects whose lives putatively “matter” (under either of the slogans above). Embracing the fugitive aspects of inconsistencies and paradoxes with which structures of antiblackness are riddled and the bad-faith gestures upon which performances of antiracism too often depend, deader than dead suggests that undermining such structures necessitates destabilizing the hypocrisies that found and perpetuate them.
Dancing Macabrely
As the Hammer's website explains, deader than dead began as an “intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion in order to illustrate emotional distance,” and the choreography originally consisted of ten dancers who would remain “expressively flat.”5 The final work consists of three dancers, Jasper Marsalis, Jasmine Orpilla, and Austyn Rich, wearing masks, an element that heightens the deadpan quality to which Lewis was originally drawn. Such masks also function to embed in the piece a long history of parodic performance, while the fact that these masks are easily recognizable as “COVID masks” ties them specifically to death as it was parodied in the long history of danse macabre, a genre Sybil Newton Cooksey eloquently explores in the context of the “revenant motion” she finds in the uncanny life-in-death aesthetics of movement deployed by contemporary black artists like Arthur Jafa, Storyboard P, and Kahlil Joseph.6 In the context of a global pandemic, the masks worn in deader than dead evoked the universal sense of imminent death felt at the time, a universality, in turn, haunted by the ongoing imminence of black death particularized by George Floyd's murder. Participating in the tradition of the danse macabre, Lewis's piece “unfolds in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis, and the void, each one tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample.”7 By leaning into this historical genre during a time of global pandemic, Lewis highlights the fungibility of black life, calling out “the ways in which the experience of black death haunts the universalizing tropes of the danse macabre . . . to haunt the notion of haunting.”8
The tragicomic effect of deader than dead's “dark humor” additionally resonates with the tone of the horror-comedy of Peele's films as the filmmaker similarly problematizes black social life through embodied states of falling. Just as Lewis's performers try to get off the ground but repeatedly fall back down at various moments in deader than dead, Peele's characters in Get Out fall infamously into the Sunken Place and “out of character,” for instance, when Andre/ “Logan” (LaKeith Stanfield) refuses to code-switch at the garden party and suddenly corpses the role of death, springing suddenly to life. Both Lewis and Peele choreograph moments where a performer's or character's very movements evoke the stirring of life in death that Cooksey describes as “revenant motion.”9 Thinking of performance's fugitivity in deader than dead in the context of the “uncanny animation” of “revenant motion,” in which movement's vitality is interrupted by and intertwined with death, I argue that within this motion we also find corpsing's intertwining of subjective agency and compromised agency, performance and corpsed performance as the bad-faith conditions of nominally postrace societies premised on antiblackness. In other words, Peele and Cooksey help clarify deader than dead's proposal: if corpsing suggests that the only way to escape the role of black death is to deaden it, such deadening involves both revealing and weaponizing the bad-faith performances upon which black “freedom” in modern society is premised.
There is an uncanniness to both corpsing, whereby “deadening a role” reveals that a performance taken as reality was in fact a fabrication, and to bad faith, where the familiarity and sincerity of someone's intentions are revealed to be insincere. Here, “revenant motion” is helpful in describing how the uncanny problematics of corpsing and bad faith are performed through gestures and movements where the fluidity of a performer's motion is abruptly halted and stopped, only to awkwardly start again, recalling what Dixa Ramirez D'Oleo has called the “broken automatons” of Lewis's earlier piece, Water Will (in Melody) (2018).10 In these moments where human bodies seem “animated” by forces beyond their control, revenant motion becomes also fugitive motion. These glitchy moments might also be read as ones wherein the subject corpses the performance of control, revealing the reality of being controlled by forces synonymous with a social paradigm predicated on antiblackness and black death. Thus, they act as revelatory ruptures in the continuity of a performance of racial equality acted out over a reality of social life predicated on antiblackness.
In deader than dead, performers dance, strut, pantomime quotidian actions, “die,” and come to life through zombie-like movements across a yellow mat illuminated by fluorescent lights in a large white room. The interface of the camera with the dancer's moving bodies and the use of split screen as the cinematic rectangle frequently divides from one into three or four frames at once multiplies our perspectives of the performance. This variety of views fragments the performance's space and time, creating ruptures that might be read as “disarticulated joints” in the sense of Lauren McLeod Cramer's application of architectural “diagramming” to Kahlil Joseph's video for Flying Lotus's Until the Quiet Comes. Cramer explains that diagramming “proliferates potential architectural joints” and “performs its disruptive function by creating a spatio-temporal crisis . . . [that] produces an excess of forms from alternative times and spaces and allows them to exist at once.”11 For Cramer, this proliferation of joints destabilizes “anti-black architectures” by putting into question the singular essentiality of their foundations. deader than dead proliferates joints within the movements of dancers and the time of the performance to create a similar spatiotemporal crisis. For instance, occasionally, shots juxtaposed in a split frame picture slightly different moments in the time of the performance, allowing the past to linger into the present. At about one minute and fifty seconds into the video, a split screen divides the frame into one bottom rectangle and two top squares, and a dancer who falls in the bottom screen falls “again” in a slightly closer shot a split second later in the upper right frame. If theatrical corpsing occurs when an actor is “put out of his part,” thus exposing the limits of performance, the corpsing I am suggesting here similarly ruptures the singularity and thus the coherence of visual representation. In deader than dead the excesses that ensue from such ruptures often create a fated repetition where the past contaminates present and future, while the rigor mortis–like stiffening of the muscles that allows the dancer's right arm to rise as if from the grave (fig. 3) predicts an ironic or paradoxical life in this “death,” a life nonetheless haunted by death as a foregone conclusion. deader than dead thus deploys excess perspectives to suggest a fugitivity arising from, and available to, the discontinuities of revenant motion's location of animation in death and the real discontinuities of subjective perspective exposed by deader than dead's multiple frames.
Corpsing Liberal Bad Faith: Get Out
Lewis's displacement of bodies through her mobile frame mimics corpsing's exposure of the “limits of performance,” finding formal sympathy with Peele's use of cinematic and narrative framing to corpse the performance of white liberal antiracism in Get Out, a performance consisting of such bon mots as Dean's (Bradley Whitford) declaration, “I would have voted for Obama a third time.” Similarly, the film's auction sequence begins with a medium close-up of Dean, standing atop a stage making clearly sinister but incomprehensible “empty gestures” that echo the hollowness of his antiracist performances up to this point in the film. The frame slowly widens to reveal that he is conducting a silent auction of Chris, not only corpsing Dean's performance as an antiracist but also suggesting the dangers of assuming empty gestures to be benign. That is, this narrative and cinematic reframing reveals how “virtue signaling” is a dangerous performance of bad faith (figs. 4 and 5).
Like the performance of being “already dead”12 for the black subject, white antiracism is a role that can be corpsed, though unlike the felicitous corpsing of the role of black death in which the subject might deaden this role assigned by society, the corpsability of antiracism is fundamental to the very structure of societies premised on antiblackness. As such, in deader than dead, the corpsing and corpsability of white antiracism are displayed as equally fundamental to the “black state of exception”—that is, the social life of black death—as is antiblack racism, simply another mutation (the bad fate) of a history of antiblackness.13 For both Lewis and Peele, maintaining the status of black death as integral to social life relies upon bad-faith performances of antiracism that, perhaps even more than racism itself, allow it to persist by pretending it is over simply because it has been named or glimpsed by nonblacks, or because Obama was elected president. Within performances of white antiracism lies the bad-faith condition of intending/believing one thing while pretending to intend/believe the opposite (e.g., that “black lives matter”). For both deader than dead and Get Out, such bad faith is also a condition of “bad fate,” as both works inscribe bad faith as the tragic fate of a social world whose history is predicated on black death. This history repeats itself in mutated iterations that play upon a “postracial” society's training to ignore or repress racism “hiding” in plain sight.
Better Ways of Dying: Capricci
deader than dead refuses to repress the artifice of theatrical representation, showing the seams of performance and the artifice of filmmaking, just as it fails to repress and instead performs what Marriott calls the “fatal way of being alive” that defines black social life. In deader than dead, the limits of theatrical representation (the offstage) resonate with the limits of (the performance of) black subjectivity: by allowing the shadow of the camera and cameraperson to be captured; by including in the frame the space beyond the edge of the yellow mats that comprise the “stage” upon which the dancers perform, an “offstage” space in which the dancers sometimes regroup and that includes a wall against which they pose as if performing the notion of being “up against a wall,” a phrase referring to a police lineup (fig. 6).
A striking incorporation of process into performance in deader than dead comes as a nod to the final sequence of Carmelo Bene's 1969 film Capricci, where, as Lewis describes it, the main character “and his love are repeatedly dying.”14 Bene's scene entails both the repeated death of the two characters as they fall to the ground and their rising up and repositioning themselves to die again (fig. 7, video 2). The scenes incorporate different “takes” of the couple's death (a death which should be singular and definitive), as well as scenes that would otherwise be excluded from a final cut, a B-roll capturing of what happens in between takes as the actors momentarily step out of character to reposition themselves for the camera. In these outtakes, the characters seem to be making themselves more comfortable in death and/or more photogenic for the camera when “no one” is looking. This particular reference to Capricci, played out in various ways by Lewis's dancers as they pose and repose each other's dying and “dead” bodies, recalls Cooksey's reading of Storyboard P's “awareness of how his body looks on camera”; how “he appears to flicker, like a figure in a zoetrope,”15 or “does this thing where he's glitching, in the manner of a YouTube video marred by a bad internet connection,” as it has been described.16 In fact, what draws Lewis to Bene's lovers is precisely an awareness of the camera's presence offering an intentionality, as well as an elusive quality, to their performance of dying as performance. Lewis positions her dancers within this slippery space that locates within a technology of capture, a technology that can fix representation and identity, a feature of fugitivity paradoxically characteristic of media that promise to show us everything but are limited to twenty-four frames per second or the speed of an internet connection.17
Bene’s lovers absurdly die repeatedly, each time making themselves more photogenic and comfortable in death. Excerpt from Capricci (Carmelo Bene, 1969).
Bene’s lovers absurdly die repeatedly, each time making themselves more photogenic and comfortable in death. Excerpt from Capricci (Carmelo Bene, 1969).
The Obscene Hopes of Bad Faith: Macbeth
As if perfecting their dying, Lewis's actors engage in similar repetitions to Bene's. They drag each other across the stage and reposition one another's bodies against the yellow mat and on top of each other, evoking the humorous absurdity of a picture of death as repetitive or repeatable in a biting critique of the contemporary status of black life haunted by slavery's afterlives. The absurdity of such repetitions is also central to Lewis's use of Shakespeare's Macbeth. deader than dead opens with the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth, laying out a premise of bad faith for the matter and mattering of black life it interrogates.
Around five minutes into deader than dead, a voice says,
To crudely summarize, it is a description of total blackness, total despair. . . . You have to think and analyze in rehearsal totally so that your imagination, being fed by the concrete metaphors, concrete images and pictures, can then feed into the body, into gestures . . . and here comes the word which is important, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . . an irregular line, given weight by its repetition three times.
Lifted from Ian McKellen's one-man show “Acting Shakespeare” (1982),18 these words describe the experience of performing Macbeth to underline the corpsing of the dancers’ representations of black subjectivity as death and picturing the death of this death. Lewis uses McKellen's descriptions of the machinations and self-programming of onstage embodiment to make clear the careful construction of the role of black subjectivity as one that is being-toward-death, “[your imagination] being fed by the concrete metaphors, concrete images and pictures, can then feed into the body, into gestures.” After these instructions, McKellen goes on to quote Macbeth, “and here comes the word, which is important, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” lines which continue in Macbeth act 5, scene 5 (as Lewis quotes from memory in her Q&A with Zondi), “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Macbeth's fateful words, in which tomorrow multiplies into three, presents an absurdity similar to the singular death of Bene's lovers taking place over and over again and Lewis's dancers repeatedly dying. That Macbeth's lines follow from McKellen's instructions for the actor to “think and analyze in rehearsal so totally . . . a description of total blackness, total despair, that life is finite,” connects the bad fate of the redundancy of “tomorrow” with a performativity central to bad faith. The word “tomorrow” promises hope, but uttered three times it denotes a deferral of that hope, undercutting its promise as false. One tomorrow should be enough, we shouldn't need three. In turn, three is a bad omen in Macbeth,19 like the three witches responsible for Macbeth's fate, which is itself delivered in the bittersweetness of false hope, the Third Witch having told Macbeth, “that shalt be king hereafter,” only to immediately describe Banquo as “Lesser than Macbeth, and greater / Not so happy, yet much happier / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none: / So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo!” Macbeth's good fate comes wrapped in his demise—if he will be king but so will Banquo's children, he will be king but will also die on the throne. Like Macbeth, the fate of black subjectivity in deader than dead is to possess false hope based on bad faith, of a better world to come subtended by the compulsion to ceaselessly perform the inscription of black death in social life.
Featured in deader than dead, Macbeth's lines describe life as “a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” as Shakespeare corpses the actor's performance by using the “player” and the “stage” self-reflexively as a metaphor for life itself. While for Macbeth this moment points to the universality of performance within social life, much as Cooksey reads in works of revenant motion “the particularity of black death” haunting the “universalizing tropes of the danse macabre,” the particular performance of black death in contemporary social life haunts the universality of Macbeth's commentary on performance. In the context of Lewis's dancers, the reference to Macbeth and its own self-reflexivity, point to the performance (and performativity) of black subjectivity's prescribed role of being “socially dead because of the fears and hatreds of others . . . acting at the behest that [the subject's] social life is lived always under the threat of suffering harm and of being corpsed the moment that he claims life.”20
Including the messy processes that produce art, Lewis also makes visible the otherwise “obscene,” in the literal ancient Greek sense of “ob skene” (off stage) but also as reference to extreme emotion that is too degrading to show on stage. Just as in the world of theater and filmmaking, where offstage space, the cameraperson's shadow, and instructions to the actors must remain invisible, so too the integrity of the performance of a “postrace” society depends on keeping offstage and unseen the pain of black death as integral to the production of social life. Obscene in both senses, deader than dead foregrounds and retrieves the performance of black death from its unseen but integral social position. Breaking onto the conventional space of the stage, “obscene” movements representing violence, pain, and death construe the “intimacies of death” and the “permeability of life and death.”21
The Forking of Bad Faith
Lewis's description of deader than dead as a “meditation on death . . . a condition of bad faith/bad fate,” allows bad faith (and what might be argued as its temporal corollary, bad fate) to be viewed in three distinct but overlapping ways. The first is the scenario in which someone promises one thing while intending another (intent to deceive): the “tomorrows” of Macbeth's soliloquy in deader than dead and the condition of “antiracism” in Get Out. The second applies to an existential question of free will posed by Sartre, in which a subject evades or denies herself the freedom that is an inherent feature of life but paradoxically exercises her freedom to do this.22 Taken either way, the notion of bad faith reflects a fork in time, one in which the subject intends one thing and another, concomitant, one in which these intentions are false, two roles assumed simultaneously: a face and a mask worn over it. Taken in the Sartrean sense and outside the context of race or of antiblackness, these simultaneous worlds constitute one in which the subject is free and another in which the subject uses their freedom to actively deny their own free will. But, a third scenario emerges from the consideration of Afropessimism's view of a “black state of exception” whereby black subjects are “said to live as objects and are regarded as subjects dead to the law . . . who live in a state of permanent threat or injury.”23 Here, Sartre's existential bad faith forks once again into one world in which humans are theoretically free, even if that freedom amounts to its own denial, and a world of black exception wherein black subjects are denied the very subjective agency to subscribe to or to deny their own free will within a racist social system. Indeed, in Get Out, when Missy pesters a hypnotized Chris about why he “did nothing” as a child when his mother died, the main character's supposed free will to act (as “anyone” might) rests precisely upon the shared knowledge of his actual lack of free will within a society that nevertheless reminds him of his responsibilities as a “free subject” under law—a reminder that guilts and shames him about not living up to responsibilities that putatively come from rights he “should” but does not entirely possess. Thus, these “shoulds” are premised on the bad-faith assessment of a black man possessing the same existential free will Sartre presumes of the universal subject. As Marriott puts it, “Race is the means by which corpsing comes to be a metaphor for social life, insofar as the slave fails to perform any juridical understanding of the subject as alive or sovereign, because it is perceived as having been born symbolically dead . . . and therefore is reduced to an object.”24 The bad faith that premises white antiracism in Get Out, which inevitably pushes the main character into an abyss that visualizes the “supernatural limit of what it means to be a person,”25 suggests the ontological shifts in the human signaled by black life that haunts (in Cooksey's sense of this term) the universal availability of existential bad faith.
Peele's film Us furthers the notion of the illegibility of black subjectivity to juridical understandings of personhood in what Vox calls its endless sprawl of an ending, focusing specifically on the role of dance as a state beyond language. In the film, we are given to understand that the main character Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) has taken up dance after a traumatic event—the moment in which she is surreptitiously replaced by her double named Red. When “she” (Red assuming the role of Adelaide) reemerges and is unable to speak, a child psychiatrist recommends to her distraught parents that they “encourage her to dance, draw, anything to tell us what happened.” Doubles like Red, which the film calls “tethers,” are enslaved to the actions of their “originals” living aboveground, and thus they are shadows that live without free will. Their motions are alternately scuttering, like small animals, and robotic like automatons. The life-in-death nature of their movements that brings an intimacy between the human and the inhuman or those with agency and free will and those without, recall Cooksey's concept of revenant motion, Walter and Georgina in Get Out, and the dancers in deader than dead. The tethers embody Marriott's description of black social death as a rule of life, as is certainly the case for the person living as Adelaide, who for years has been the walking (thriving) dead. Indeed, as the original tether, Red, pretending to be Adelaide, becomes “deader than dead” by challenging the bad faith of a society wherein life is predicated on subjugation and death by enacting her own bad faith. In this sense, revenant performers seize upon the fugitive aspects of the bad-faith performance of black equality and antiracism (particularly those suggested by the idyllic picture of the black upper-middle-class family's beach life in Us or in the liberal white family's warm welcome of their daughter's black boyfriend in Get Out). The fugitivity available within bad faith's slipperiness exists beneath these performances of antiracism and equality—this is true, quite literally, in the Sunken Place.
Exploiting Cinematic Ontology's Bad Faith through Dance
The multiple frames of deader than dead underscore the slipperiness with which dance confronts the camera's bad faith promise to show us “everything,” highlighting all that remains uncapturable to recording equipment as that which may also evade the capture of a carceral state. Us's reliance upon similar tensions between the camera's capture and performances that resist it helps illustrate the ironic fugitivity Lewis locates between camera and body. In Us's final dance sequence, Red's body evades the blows of her opponent (Adelaide, the former Red) by gracefully weaving and bending around them, with the help of what Cramer might call “joints” that cut between this fight to the death and flashbacks of Adelaide/Red as a graceful ballerina (figs. 8–9). Like Storyboard P's and Jafa's juxtapositions and mixing of pleasure and pain, dance and death, “virtuosity and handicap,”26 in this scene the living Adelaide (who we find out is really a revenant Red) is dressed as a zombie risen from the dead, bloodied white clothes in tatters, while Red, whose automated-seeming, uncanny, glitchy movements begin to appear gracefully stealthy and resilient, seems suddenly of the world of the living. Red exploits the fugitivity of the “inhuman” inherent to her very own “automated” movements just as Lewis's dancers turn movements that make their bodies appear to be controlled by a puppeteer into movements that rupture the expectations of that control, as when they collapse even further to the floor rather than “coming to life” at the outset of the work. Similar to Red's, the movements of Lewis's dancers can be seen as exploiting the off-screen world's bad faith as it denies the very freedom it putatively celebrates as universal.
Displaced Origins
Marriott's description of the condition of black social life as defined by the “revenant, forced to live under a law of revendication, a word meaning both ownership and disfiguration,” could not be more appropriate here or to Lewis's danse macabre; “blackness is always displaced regarding its origin—that origin can never be reached.”27 The incessant trade-off between Adelaide and Red at the end of Us can be read both in terms of the displaced origin described here (Who, after all, is the original? Adelaide or Red?). As alternately revenant and revealing of the displaced origins of blackness, their struggle is similarly staged in deader than dead, as it is unclear whether Lewis's dancers have died or were always already dead.
This displacement of the “origin of blackness” denotes a representation of history and temporality in which the past's entanglement with the present translates bad faith into “bad fate.” In deader than dead, dancers perform a time when they were alive (as we see them fall to the floor and rise again), a time in which they “are” alive (where living as a black subject is defined as being “already dead”), while also participating in a present time where they are dying. As Zondi observes, “Lewis helps us think about time as not just progressing, but also that the contemporary carries so much of what we thought we'd moved on from.” Indeed, this temporal scenario where the persistent presence of the past undermines the good faith of the present is central to deader than dead's meditation on time. Lewis's dancers perform the scenario Frank Wilderson III has described, of “violence and captivity” as the “grammar and ghosts of our every gesture.”28 For Marriott, this rhetoric refers to “racial slavery as a foundational event that, far from being over, is endlessly repeating . . . the social life of black social death acts as a kind of ‘index,’ or “grammar,” that defines both the possibility and limit of black speech and existence.”29 Here, violence and captivity, a virtual state subtending even the seemingly liberated movements of Lewis's dancers during their electronic dance party, becomes a pharmakon: the fugitive quality of the subversive and often hidden bad faith of a social life premised on black death and hiding in plain sight as grammar and index are exploited by Lewis's dancers to embody a life and freedom defined by the same “escape from capture” at work in bad faith.
The description of bad faith with which Lewis frames her piece suggests that the world in which we have, or in which “we” intend to move on from a past defined by antiblackness, in which we are no longer a society predicated on racism, is a representation, a performance, subject to the corpsing of the matter of black life—a fatal way of being alive—which reveals the artificiality of too many performances of antiracism. Thus, when the subjects fall out of that representation by dropping “dead,” the fugitive and often inscrutable world in which the promise of antiracism is false becomes visible, informed and occupied (still, perhaps permanently so) by a past of antiblackness from which we thought we had “moved on” but have not, a past that is revealed as having been (still) there all along—bad faith becomes bad fate. Simultaneously and crucially, in the work of Lewis and Peele, the fugitive elements that comprise both of these concepts are presented as “oppositional joints” where the architectures of antiblackness are potentially the weakest and also where the basis for entire structures might be undone and reconceived.
Notes
Cooksey, “Revenant Motion,” 93. Cooksey cites Regg Roc as quoted in Weiner, “Impossible Body.”
Such fugitivity may also register the centrality of smartphone technology's video capture of anti-black violence to the rising visibility of that violence and hence a possible escape from it (a fugitivity referenced by Peele in the smartphone flash's role in breaking André’s Coagula Method–induced spell in Get Out and enabling him to shout the titular lines to Chris, “Get out!”).
For a recorded version of the show broadcast as a TV special, see Paul Carmichael, “Acting Shakespeare—Ian McKellan,” uploaded October 3, 2017, YouTube video, 1:25:36, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6eztyfrWo8&ab_channel=PaulCarmichael.
Bruegel's painting Triumph of Death (ca. 1562), another source for Lewis's piece, is dominated by the three fates, Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis.
This intimacy is inherent to both danse macabre and to the revenant motion Cooksey describes when she compares Storyboard P's performance in Kahlil Joseph and Flying Lotus's Until the Quiet Comes to medieval danse macabre descriptions of “the skeleton's dance, all contorted limbs and disquieting mobility, while the stilled world of the living looks on” (“Revenant Motion,” 100). For Cooksey, Storyboard P's movements evoke an “intimacy with death” (104) inherent to black experience which she quotes Claudia Rankine in describing as “the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black” (102–3).
Sartre writes, “If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith. The origin of this risk is the fact that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it is.” Being and Nothingness, 70.