Will Rawls, Regular Degular Screening (2 of 3)
Date: Saturday, June 10, 2023
Time: 6:00-8:00PM (Regular Degular runs 20 minutes, and will be looped during this time)
Location: Greenfinch Theater & Dive, 2525 S Jefferson Ave, St. Louis, MO
Details:
Will Rawls thinks of time, gesture, language, and Black performance as unstable terms that he manipulates to reimagine the world from a position of being racially marked. Often using a combination of utterance and movement, Rawls sculpts the building blocks of bodily expression to influence and complicate the consumption of Black performers beyond conventional narratives of Black pain or exaltation. With stop-motion filmmaking, Rawls explores the limits, burdens, and abstractions of representation that coincide in a Black performer’s body. Stop-motion is an extremely slow and arduous form of filmmaking, especially when using live performers, that requires over eight hundred photos for one and a half minutes of film.
REGULAR DEGULAR is a response to the disparate architectural, economic, and historical tensions that lie on the surface of St. Louis. These tensions exist because of, and are constantly reproduced by, an anti-Black formation of American cities that raze or renew neighborhoods based on their racial and economic make-up and use value. REGULAR DEGULAR stars a single performer, former Katherine Dunham dancer Heather Himes Beal, as she moves through four sites that straddle the intersection of I-44 and Jefferson Avenue. REGULAR DEGULAR trespasses the Jefferson/I-44 boundary to implicate different sites with each other and thus create connectivity while still working in a filmic idiom of disaggregation—reflected in the stop-motion, frame-by-frame “time-lapse” aesthetic.
The four locations for the film (and its sites of presentation) are Johnnie Brock's Dungeon Party Warehouse, McDonald’s, St. Louis Public Library (Barr Branch), and Lafayette Park United Methodist Church. The performer and film modulate differently in each site based on how Rawls felt each site represents a different notion of “time.” In this project, the porous and generous medium of dance becomes a tool that can connect these places—not through the important but ultimately inadequate methods of writing down history, but through the echoes of body-to-body knowledge that the dancer carries with them.
