Darrell Jones

 CLUTCH 

Risky weight within Drive State (slow-motion, top view) overlaid on William R. Jones audio lectures from 1977-2009 

STATEMENT:

“We are creating archives whether we want to or not” 

CLUTCH was a year-long artistic residency at the Maggie Allesse  National Center for Choreographic Research (MANCC) and concurrently an archival project at the Strozier Library Special Collections that worked with the William R. Jones Archive, author of the ground breaking work Is God A White Racist? and celebrated activist, scholar, philosopher, theologian, and educator.  

Housed in 166 archival boxes Jones’ collection encompassed authored books and articles, video, taped audio lectures and 35 years of teaching materials around mechanisms of oppression and the intersectionality of race, gender and class. 

This process of archiving my father’s work ran parallel with my own creative applications around  “artist generated” archives, using digital technologies and live performance as a way to generate new work from archival materials and increase access to a body of work for audiences. In preparing my father’s archive for public access, I recorded comments on the materials I excavated from each box. I became, as his father’s son, a living “analog” of the archive, an additional source of archival information, speaking  and moving both about and beside the materials and “performing” the archive beyond the visual (paper) representation of the work. The interaction between the academic and artistic spaces was important to leverage two desired outcomes of the project, developing a specific new set of skills in archival methods/methodologies and engaging with the creation of new series of dance works CLUTCH.

"The harder the cross the brighter the crown”  

The above expression used by my great-grandfather encapsulated many of the teaching of the Baptist church at his time.    My father’s seminal book, Is God A White Racist?,  was in some ways meant as an antidote and indictment on the idea of redemptive suffering as blessing and a budding analysis of the inner workings of oppression. As his tools were often words and speech, mine are cellular, embodied, and expressed mainly in the physical and three-dimensional world. I can trace a direct line to how experimenting and analyzing liberation as it lives in the body, connects directly to his theories in how oppression operates. 

As an area of study, performance is a huge part of my scholarly and creative endeavor. I’m fascinated by how individuals accumulate identity and mirror culture through movement and the pluralism of ideas and forms that live within the moving body. An inherent component of performance is the productive use of one’s physical and intellectual instruments. This type of body/mind problem solving, in my experience, fosters creative, associative and adaptable strategies. In the initial level of processing of the William R. Jones papers I applied my research of ethnographic and movement-based approaches into the archival process noting where methods were comparable or contrasting and how constituting the archive could be in conversation with more recent developments in the field of archiving.  By involving choreographic thinking in the processing of the archive and unraveling physicality and metaphors found in the papers, I explored how the labor can be a metaphor for global ideas of power and transgression.  

This project will build the foundation for enabling and justifying sustained public engagement with the collection of WRJ’s papers, publications, lecture recordings both analog and digitized, and highlight how to best share with the public an archive of the work of a revolutionary scholar at a revolutionary time.   

I am imbued with a sense of urgency for this work. Interaction with this legendary figure and these legacy materials reflect where content can invite audience and scholars deeper into the narratives behind the papers and how the content in the boxes and the bodies that inevitably interact with them, can meet the current moment.