“Love is the Great Rebellion,” Performance, Film, Conversation, and Q&A

In the wake of the Watts Uprisings, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the raging Vietnam War, a group of African and African American students, including Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, entered film school at UCLA. Forming a group, now called, the L.A. Rebellion, these innovative filmmakers sought to create cinema that showed the full complexity of black life. The films by Burnett and Dash, in particular, remove the white gaze from their characters, and approach their storytelling of black life using instead, according to Daniel Alexander Jones, lenses of love, itself a great rebellion against the limited one-dimensional characters that previously dominated American cinema. Charles Burnett has created American masterpieces such as To Sleep with Anger and Killer of Sheep. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust  (1991) was the first film by an African American woman to receive general theatrical release in the United States. While in a graduate theater study program at Brown University, films by members of the L.A. Rebellion, were a centerpiece of inspiration for the interdisciplinary theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones and his cohort. Jones’ distinctive dramaturgy is rooted in Black American and Queer Performance traditions, and his work explores ideas of the Afromystical (awakening awareness of the numinous in every day through ritualized performance). What might we learn about art-making from these legendary artists in the midst of our contemporary layered crises of global pandemic, necessary Black Lives Matter uprisings, global racialized populism, and global warming? Come find out!

The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics’ (CAAPP) week-long Black Study Intensive, “Collective Protest and Rebellion,” features poet/essayist/novelist Dionne Brand, filmmaker Charles Burnett, filmmaker Julie Dash, poet/performer/composer JJJJJerome Ellis, poet Aracelis Girmay, scholar Emily Greenwood, writer/cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, poet/scholar Erica Hunt, interdisciplinary theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones­, photographer Zun Lee, poet/scholar Harryette Mullen, and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon as a way to think in creativity toward collective agency and social change. With urgency, we look toward the 2020/2021 academic year as an opportunity to, in Fred Moten’s sense of the word, “study” together, what he sometimes calls talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. This week we come together to engage in black study in community during this time of upheaval and repair. It is here where we seek innovative discovery in the act of creating as productive of new knowledges that help change the world.