LOOK OUT//WORK AROUND: artistic reflections with Cat Mahari, Tuli Bera, and Drew Lewis by Courtney Mackedanz
Images captured by Ricardo Adame, Collage created by Aaliyah Christina
WORK AROUND series curated by Kara Brody & Amanda Maraist
Produced by Steppenwolf’s LOOK OUT Series.
Blk Ark: The Impossible Manifestation by Cat Mahari
Bangali Meye - How Did You Get Here? by Tuli Bera
Heavy Objects by Drew Lewis
February 4th - February 12th
Steppenwolf 1700 Theater
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Both Steppenwolf’s LOOK OUTseries and Kara Brody & Amanda Maraists WORK AROUND series serve as invigorating openings to engage the creative pulse and artistic breadth of performance practices coming out of Chicago. I sat down with artists Cat Mahari, Tuli Bera, and Drew Lewis to reflect on the reordering of relationships toward unequivocal change, how sensory experiences create memory portals, and steeping in shapes made in both internal and external space. Read along with our playfully meandering and wildly condensed conversations for insights into the origins and inquiries that steer these artists and their projects:
Image captured by Ricardo Adame
Courtney Mackedanz
As a means of jumping in, could you describe where Blk Ark: The Impossible Manifestation comes from?
Cat Mahari
This work came to me in 2016 from the idea of looking at ropes, ties, binding, and community and how that all intertwines. I was working already in another process, looking at different learnings, viewpoints, and understandings of the world via partner dancing, black partner dancing, specifically. Then in May of 2021, the project said, "I'm coming, get ready!" This work was like, "I got next!"
Courtney Mackedanz
Once the work reveals itself to you how do you respond?
Cat Mahari
How I respond is to start looking at everything related to play. Exploring the relationship between black anarchism and play, I was doing a lot of research around Lorenzo Komboa's work, specifically. I correlated some of the ideas around mutual cooperation, voluntary participation, and open-ended discovery, which are critical to play, but are also critical to an anarchist process and practice. Then coming from a background in hip hop, I knew Rhythm Metrics (which is this mobility, dance, and sacred wisdom training created by Sekou Heru in New York City). I had already started incorporating Rhythm Metrics into how I taught hip-hop because the Rhythm Metrics board is quite similar to hopscotch—so one way to access Rhythm Metrics is to access it through play.
Courtney Mackedanz
The play felt so apparent in the work! I remember coming into the space and seeing marks on the floor which looked either like a language or like hopscotch...or like hopscotch turned into a secret language, you know what I mean?
Cat Mahari
Exactly, I think there are languages. Rhythm Metrics dives deep into this idea of movements and sacred geometries as languages. I was actually just doing some research on nolids, which is a type of shape where you can tell what is going on at all the corners of a shape just by analyzing one corner of the shape—I find that to be a very interesting paradigm. Particularly when I think about how things come to be and how things undergird the world. There are things and processes and practices that undergird our worldmaking and they are over here as much as they are over there.
Courtney Mackedanz
On that note, I want to ask what it means to you to be actively working towards manifesting the impossible?
Cat Mahari
It's a lot of fun to manifest the impossible. I think that fun may not always be pleasant, you know what I mean? It's a very necessary thing to manifest the impossible. I liken the work to being on a bus and getting people on the bus, meaning getting people on board toward the goal of unequivocal change. Some people get off early because they're at all the things that we know. Then there are going to be those of us—who are now and will come later—that are going toward the impossible.
Courtney Mackedanz
I'm thinking with an appreciation for the notion of anarchy in your work. Which other thinking spaces or physical spaces pour back into your process? Which spaces encourage you to stay on the bus and keep exploring?
Cat Mahari
The environments that most influenced this work were right there in Washington Park, where I live, in the South side of Chicago. One of the epicenters of the neighborhood is this church parking lot, lounge parking lot, and basketball court all in one. It's really an interesting lodestone and site with multiple kinds of interactions, so that environment has really influenced the work.
Then anarchism, it's just really important to me, particularly Black Anarchism. Anarchists demand a complete reordering of relations of power. Blackness is a space of subjectivity outside of current norms. What does that then demand? Black Anarchism is an impossible manifestation. It's part of the idea of having to go towards something that is not even currently practiced or processed.
You know how Stephen Hawking has the whole 'information can never be released from a black hole' kind of shit? I'm more towards a Roger Penrose thing. I'm not concerned about what comes in or out of a black hole, but the idea that the universe itself is a cyclical process. At the depth of the universe is actually the birth of another universe, so I look at impossible manifestation more in that way.
That's why I go into black cultural technologies and re-understand them within their more radical and resistant origins or practices. I'm thinking about how to reorder my understanding and how we all might need to engage in these practices because they can—via their blackness, their play, and their anarchism—be a relational path toward a different world.
Courtney Mackedanz
As a final question, what's the ideal space for this ongoing impossible manifestation?
Cat Mahari
Where the people are—where the people are for sure—where the people are.
Image captured by Ricardo Adame
Courtney Mackedanz
Throughout Bangali Meye there's such a porosity between materials—the scents, songs, colors, textures—can you speak about where this dance comes from?
Tuli Bera
In performing Bengali Meye, I am actually cooking in the work. I am actually speaking. I want to sing these songs and I want to speak Bengali. I want more of that outside of my bubble of home comfort with my sister or mom or father, you know? To share something like that is extremely vulnerable.
Movement can be so abstract. With movement, you can almost hide behind it so it's like people will actually never know what I'm thinking—I'm trying to get out of that performative being—I want to dance less. I think it's because movement has never been truly for me. My dancing and performing history was very much from an authoritative, "you will do this" place, so to be my own authority is moreso in saying "no" lately.
I was almost planning on having no movement in this piece but was thinking instead about what other movement is in the work? There's movement in the cooking, there's movement in the dialogue, in the exchange of thought, and within myself and whoever is viewing it. I think food really is one of the ways that I feel Bengali so I knew food had to be a part of it and the project was centered around the timing of the cooking. (Tuli shakes head and laughs.) Which was difficult! I was like, this should not be this hard!?
Courtney Mackedanz
It felt delicious to think about how each of our bodies is holding memories and how there might be certain memories that one's own body can't hold alone—so maybe food holds some of it?
Tuli Bera
The cooking station was like, "I am here with you. We're here in this space together". Whenever dance happened I would cue it with the line "whenever I think of this daal I think of..." and that took me into a memory space, which is where the movement came from. It's what I am unable to share—or what I won't share—with my words.
I often feel like there's one persona that you express externally but what you're feeling internally can be a complete contrast. I'm often in two places or multiple places at once. What I do here might remind me of seeing my grandfather somewhere else. It's like spacing out, you're called into something else and then you're taken from one place into another—that was at least the goal, you know? I'm no longer interested in just dancing shapes.
Courtney Mackedanz
Do you mind talking about the installation that framed the space? I believe the fabrics were your mother's textiles?
Tuli Bera
Those are sarees. They were all of my mother's older ones, I was like "do not give me new ones!" She also lent me a few that my sister and I were holding toward the end, those are my grandmother's, just like the song that we sang. In a way, I feel like I need all of these things to be like, "I am Bengali". I think as I get older I don't want to feel isolated in these thoughts. The very first Bengali Meye I put clothing everywhere. I just like the colors! I think when I go back to Calcutta or the village my father grew up in it's just so vibrant. I need those colors to remind me, it's like a hug!
Courtney Mackedanz
There's something amazing about using the space of performance to create conditions where you can thrive! Maybe there's another way to think about that earlier question, "where does the dance come from?" Maybe certain environments, certain memory cues, will draw out certain dances?
Tuli Bera
It's about accessing what’s already there. I think it's just like, how can we put ourselves in these spaces? Every time I cook…if I smell mustard seed oil, then I immediately…go somewhere! This performance could have just been having people over for dinner and having conversations about becoming, self-awareness, and relationship-building. I wanted the performance to be a dinner! I wanted to feed people!
Image captured by Ricardo Adame
Courtney Mackedanz
Throughout Heavy Objects the bodies act as almost a sponge toward the wider space, which feels like both a container and a void in moments. Where did this work come from?
Drew Lewis
This was probably the longest time I've ever worked on something. We worked from essentially October 2021 to February 2022—then paused—then worked again in October 2022 to February 2023. So in that there's a lot of layering! We did this experiment in the studio where we were talking about the idea of sitting on a train platform with a loved one: The train is coming and one of you is going to get on and the other one is staying. How do you spend those last few minutes together? Over time I had forgotten that movement experiment. Later we revisit that idea and pursued it further. Eventually that turned into another idea...and another idea...and another idea! There's so much time between then and now and so many different little experiments that we've done. During our Steppenwolf residency it was a beautiful process of uncovering some of those origin points.
You mentioned the space, I'd like to respond to describing it as both a container and a void. When we created this piece we were in residence at a space that was vast, sort of warehouse-y, which really played into how we were shaping the space with our bodies. So working in this massive space I was almost like, "How are we going to ever perform this?" When we got the opportunity to perform at Steppenwolf 1700 in their black box at first I was really concerned about how the piece would read with such intimacy. But then the blackness of the space lends itself to massiveity in a different way, in almost the opposite sense, which feels almost like infinitely inward versus outward.
Courtney Mackedanz
Often figures seemed to push, pull, and pry toward or away from each other within the space. You know how when you set a boundary for something then you can kinda study how that something might then overflow the boundary? I felt that quality within your movement which struck me emotionally.
Drew Lewis
You used the word pry—which is such a great word that I haven't used or haven't heard used about the piece—but I really think it is that! In a sentence you'd say, "prying something open". Think of something like a tuna can that you have to like pry open by first bending it backwards, that is a physical descriptor for something that I feel is present within this piece. A task I found myself pursuing in presenting this piece was scaling back on the emotionality of performance and keying into the physical tasks at hand. If we're emotionally performing then maybe it reads as angst, but if we're physically performing then you're just seeing the body exhibit a physicality and the emotional response is left for the viewer.
Courtney Mackedanz
I wrote a question while watching: "What does this dance do? And where does that action occur?" I wonder if you'd be willing to talk about your experience building shapes into others while trusting the audience to bring whatever they are needing to the dance?
Drew Lewis
That's really true or rings true in the way that people came up to me and generously shared their experience after the show. There were myriad responses that were completely different from my origin point. Way, way back, I originally called this piece, Depiction. When I was starting to create this work, I was dealing with a trauma that I had experienced and I was asking myself, "How do we create performance?" "How do we create depictions of trauma without re-traumatizing both the performer and the viewer?" "How do we create non-explicit depictions of those moments?" Then through two years of process, there's an entire list of all the titles that we went through before we settled on Heavy Objects. I do think that the piece has a richness to it only because it had that that gift of time to really steep in these ideas and then return to them months later and then to keep returning again and again.
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COURTNEY MACKEDANZ is a transdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. Her movement-based performances explore themes of embodied resistance and demonstrations of care within the context of ‘received and embedded choreographic conditions' (such as, algorithmic surveillance, nervous system architectures, or extractive wage labor). Mackedanz's practice incorporates critical research, creative writing, collaborative dancemaking, and visual art experimentations to explore how expanded notions of the choreographic might structure, steer, catalyze, and constrain potentials in movement. Mackedanz earned her BFA in Performance and Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.
