Elemental
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Elemental premiered at the 2024 Collegium for African Diaspora Dance Conference
Elemental is an experimental, soft-time, performance installation that inhabits pockets of possibility for a multitudinous mothering entity who is re/discovering the raw movements of life and her body soon after giving birth to her 5th child. Sourcing fragments of time, and attached to or in close physical proximity of one or more children at all times, the dancing mother activates everyday spaces as transient laboratories where she can dance, dream, and feel into the expansiveness of a world that will one day be big enough, and soft enough, to make space for all of her.
The Elemental performance installation includes video loops of the dancing mother from 3 different movement-making moments. Each dance film is a 3-minute visual story that plays simultaneously in the surrounding space while the dancing mother performs. Each piece was filmed and edited by the dancing mother.
Viewers of the Elemental pieces are transported into the dancing mother’s world, and are able to better appreciate the many nuanced and fluid labors a multitudinous mothering entity must navigate to create a generative dance moment in her body, a body that she shares with her children.
Elemental 1
Duration: 2:42
Space: Moongate Garden, outside the Smithsonian Castle, Washington, DC
Description: The dancing mother finds a soft, open space laboratory where her children can run freely as she dances, sometimes solo-bodied while her oldest son holds his baby sister, sometimes holding the baby herself, and sometimes with her baby at the breast.
Elemental 2
Duration: 2:56
Space: Roof Terrace, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC
Description: The dancing mother feels into the expansiveness of the sun and sky while wearing her baby, dancing a ringshout, and discovering new movements with her 6-year old daughter and dance partner.
Elemental 3
Duration: 2:48
Space: Dancing mother’s birthing altar/bedroom, Washington, DC
Description: A month after giving birth, an exhausted dancing mother nurses her newborn to sleep while dancing in the same room where her daughter was born, gently moving in circles and spins that help her sense how her body is healing and recovering.
Music: Le Trio Joubran “Masâr”
About this work
Elemental premiered as Elemental 123 at the 2024 Collegium for African Diaspora Dance at Duke University. This work seeks to bring visibility to the invisible labors of multitudinous mothering entities who are creating new spaces to dance by transforming unconventional sites for dancemaking because so few places, programs, and policies have been designed with them—and their children—in mind. Centering the conference’s theme BODY GEOGRAPHIES|MAPPING FREEDOMS’ inquiry of how place matters, Elemental inspires wholehearted conversations about what intelligent, compassionate, and innovative spaces for dancing mothers can look and function like. This work also evolves as an afrofuturist model of togetherness and freedom for black mothers who live with the embodied knowing that their foremothers were once enslaved and forcibly separated from their children. Elemental participates in the legacy of black dance by resisting erasure and ritualizing the celebration of all the tiny, forgotten moments a multitudinous mothering entity will make accessible for the dance.
To adapt to the virtual presentation format for the conference, Elemental 123 was shared as one film that attendees watched in successive order for a single rotation before a beautiful dialogue about the work that moderated by the phenomenal Emilie Jabouin.
