3. Gabrielle Civil: Wild Beauty
January 2023
36 pages, 5.5 x 7”
Poetry, Performance Text
979-8-9873298-2-5
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What does it mean to dance (blackness)
in blackness? inside and out?
In the heart of winter,
how can we bloom and play,
heal, share breath, and open space?
What happens if we take our time?
Wild Beauty (What happens if we take our time?) documents a creative process dilated, made possible really, by a forced pause. Dramatizing preparation for a performance (“Preparation for ritual is ritual,” as Civil has held elsewhere) on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2020, Wild Beauty highlights the erotics of dreaming with an epistolary-notational approach to collaboration and improvisation focused on “generating new performance gestures, exploring themes of diverse blackness, belonging, heritage, queerness, grief, medicine, and joy.” Written before, after, amid, and around her 2022 book the déjà vu, this chaplet collects notes, omissions, iterations, revisions, fruits, flowers, and invitations to rest, and rise, in concerted motion.
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Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet and writer originally from Detroit, MI. She is the author of four performance memoirs. The aim of her work is to open up space.
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