Creating the Party vs. Coming to Party: A Performance Script Ritual

• In Event: Loving Wholeness Together, With Grief: A Listening Session With Liner Notes

Abstract

This presentation/demonstration features a performance script ritual produced as part of a participatory research project about how Black and Indigenous creative collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time. The performance script ritual is titled, “Creating the Party vs. Coming to Party,” a poetic performance of “radical vulnerability” that among so much more makes felt, “mind-heart-body-spirit entanglements” (Nagar et al. 2023). The purpose of my offering is to practice being an artist-scholar in public alongside brilliant thinkers whose ideas of knowledge production inspire and resonate with my own. My intention is to show how my work sounds now. In this process, I trust myself, co-presenters, and those who show up to feel something that might move us all towards a kind of restoration that simultaneously substantiates collective work, playfulness as criteria of virtuosity, and radical imagination.

The theoretical and strategic frameworks of Black Girlhood Studies, Hip hop feminisms, and Black feminisms that made room enough for generations of Black girl ciphers to gather together in many different places, stretched by various kinds of institutional routines because some homegirls cared enough to orchestrate the conditions for us all to “rest assured that SOLHOT did exactly what it was supposed to do” (Bowen, 2021, p. 26), is what makes my presentation possible. Attending to “real-time transformation,” I expect to distill the relevant theoretical frameworks that moved me in discussion with co-panelists and audience with tremendous hope that we can “practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species” (brown, 2020, p. 73).

The methods I engage involve a creative process that I could categorize as qualitative, arts-based research, but now, would rather not. I am interested in sharing what I’ve learned from committing to those teachings at certain points in my journey, naming processes that some academics had not yet read in a book as methodology for the purpose of being seen with the hope of being understood within clock time.

The materials sourced for my presentation came through a participatory research project about Black and Indigenous creative collectives titled, Forms of Freedom, of which all co-panelists participated. My results/conclusions are about process. My hope is that by sharing in process about processes that mean so very much to me, we might engage in dialogue, witnessing, and radical presence that opens us up and maybe even undoes us in ways that we yearn for and want.

The scholarly significance of my work in conjunction with my co-panelists lies in its profound demonstration of how love undergirds the scholarly collaborations I most admire and have grown me as an artist-scholar, the beauty of hip hop experimentalisms, and how it is one thing to be invited to give a talk to group of Black girls and quite another (more brilliant, sensitive and intellectual) thing to be taken under wing to “get together to decide how to get together to read the poem” (Moten, 2011). Your grief is welcomed.

Author

• Ruth Nicole Brown, Michigan State University