The Brooklyn Rail

On a gray and rainy Sunday, I was among a few dozen spectators gathered at Joseph Rodman Drake Park, wedged in an industrial section of the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, for between wave and water, the latest work by Bronx-based multidisciplinary artist Alethea Pace. In my decades of walking the South Bronx, I had never explored the park and its history. Per the website of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, it was home to the Indigenous Weckquaesgeek people before it became the estate of settler Thomas Hunt and his family friend, poet Joseph Rodman Drake (for whom the neighborhood and park are respectively named), and then a burial ground for Bronx settler families such as the Hunts, Leggetts, and Willetts across from which (in a wetlands outside the cemetery) were buried the enslaved Africans whose labor helped build Hunts Point. I was unable to get a hold of a program before the performance, but I now notice that it frames the work counter-archivally, by way of a circa 1910 photo entitled “Slave Burying Ground” held by the Museum of the City of New York, which it calls “one of the few remnants documenting” the enslavement of Africans in Hunts Point, adding that “not a trace of evidence of the slave burial ground remains.”

We were offered umbrellas and separated into smaller groups of around five people, and given flowers to leave at a makeshift altar to which we were led by guides. S T A R R busby embodied the voice of the Ghost character who serves as witness throughout the piece, countering slaveholder and settler histories by invoking “Aunt Rose,” the enslaved “old cook” and her life and multigenerational legacy in Hunts Point. Only now that I am able to look at Pace’s script do I fully grasp that the bursts of text that preceded this moment read like a lineated poetic manifesto: “Tune your ear to the in between spaces. / The archive is an incomplete project. / Violence woven into its design.” The processual, embodied, and often musical quality of the writing, is in fact one of the triumphs of between wave and water, balancing investigative rigor with an engagingly syncopated and lyrical poetics that channels hip-hop cadences and the vast Afro-diasporic vernaculars and expressive cultures of the South Bronx. Even so, the work remains defiantly uncategorizable as it ebbs and flows in relation with the performers’ and audience member's bodies and the sediments and hauntings of the physical space.

Some of us, myself included, were asked to break away from our groups and sit face-to-face with a performer wearing a reflective mask who asked us questions. My interrogator, Katrina Reid, asked me in a firm yet deeply resonant voice if I could hear the sound of my heartbeat, and if I would carry the memory of an ancestor (I could not make out the ancestor’s name) and place a flower at the altar for the ancestors guided by the sounds of the drum. Taken aback, I eventually answered yes to all questions, and soon found myself by an unkempt grassy area at the other end of the park where drummer Alex LaSalle played syncopated beats echoing across the vast industrial expanse, and we were asked to give our libations of thanks and say the Yoruba affirmation “Ashé.” Imani Gaudin performed a beautifully introspective solo that balanced restraint and release, her body initially constrained by a ligature-like tree costume, which she proceeded to take off, all the while rising and falling and circling, invoking cycles of death and rebirth. Behind her in the distance I could see a faint graffiti tag on the metal gate of a warehouse against the gray sky.

I was overwhelmed by the sense of mourning, and just as I settled myself into the heaviness of the scene, we were back on the other side of the park, the dancers now coalescing around a trickster figure (unforgettably played by Maleek Rae) dressed in white and wearing black shoes and a dark gray durag. As the bodies weaved and bobbed, the trickster told a story that was half blues and half provocation, at once critiquing and embodying the “trickery” of an often-invoked “Devil” while seemingly mocking the idea that the stories of such ghosts could ever be fully knowable. Before I knew it, we were led across the street from the park, where the piece opened up in vertiginous ways, the performers now leading us across sidewalks, warehouses, and colorfully tagged red brick walls. Even when their bodies were skillfully balanced on black milk crates, the dancers interacted with each other and the audience in a thrilling social choreography. I borrow the term “social choreography” from Andrew Hewitt, and I echo his valuation of how the dancer’s body integrates into social space beyond a modernist tradition, stressing “the movement of self-transcendence as the dance disappears into the dance” (Social Choreography, p. 12).

In Pace’s work, we are never allowed to lose ourselves in the performer’s embodied virtuosity but rather returned over and over to her, her fellow performers’, and our necessarily relational, improvisatory, and precarious process of meaning making. Pace’s tricksterish poetics affords us a sense of near-euphoric release while returning us to a reckoning with the racialized body (including, perhaps, the social body of the largely Black and brown audience and of Hunts Point) as a counter-archive to histories and ongoing legacies of death and violence, which link settler colonialism and chattel slavery to modern day environmental racism and gentrification. In that sense, Pace’s work reminds me of writer and performer LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s in how it insists on neither simply the affirmational politics of Black joy nor Afro-pessimism’s politics of negation, but on something urgently in between, where new ways of making and being together emerge from the diasporic currents of Black and brown working-class New York, especially from places like Harlem and the South Bronx, whose marked and embodied geographies are far removed from the hegemony of the city’s arts and culture.

The next part of the performance involved a private bus ride to Hunts Point Riverside Park. On the bus, Maleek Rae’s performance of the trickster acquired a claustrophobic intimacy, preparing us for the riverfront finale, where the piece’s poetics of mourning and its playful sense of provocation blurred into a gorgeously understated crescendo: Maria Bauman and Maleek Rae led us forward into a lyrical choreography where the ships in these waves and water finally become visible, a moment that bridges histories of Middle Passage with Hunts Point and the Bronx’s overlooked maritime history against the stunning background of the Bronx River as it leads us away from the industrial geographies. Playing with the shape of the circle, the performers made room for a rousing solo by Pace, flanking her, a flow of bodies dressed in dark colors. By turns flailing her arms and bending over to balance herself, Pace subtly embodied the piece’s overriding tension between constraint and release, between the need to be rooted in history and the desire to be freed from the violence of the archive, until her fellow performers carried her on their shoulders and brought the piece to a close, an elegant tangle of bodies framed by the Bronx River and the gray sky.

Narrative and abstraction blur here, and I cannot help but think of the words spoken and sung by the performers as one long choral counter-poem to the pastoral gaze of white settler poets like Drake, whose 1818 poem “Bronx” apostrophizes the face of “My own romantic Bronx,” writing that “Thy waves are old companions, I shall see / A well-remembered form in each old tree,” or in the work of other early American poets whose names live on in the names of nearby Hunts Points streets and avenues (John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). Pace’s between wave and water leads us to what is submerged under the lyrical waves of Drake’s Romantic vision (displaced and laboring bodies, the violence of resource extraction and death) and urges us to interrogate his legacy: nearby PS 48 is named after Drake, and students from the school helped rediscover the burial site in 2013, paving the way for the 2023 designation of the Joseph Rodman Drake Park and Enslaved People’s Burial Ground as a landmark.

When we spoke after the performance, Pace emphasized the significance of the work being done by the Hunts Point Slave Burial Project, and she described how important navigating their sometimes unwieldy website was to the evolution of between wave and water. While she gratefully acknowledged the time and resources afforded by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Civic Practice Partnership Residency, where she developed much of the piece, she centered the role of Hunts Point community organizations in both the piece and her life and work more generally, including The Point CDC, BronxArtSpace, and Inspiration Point as well as the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (formerly located in Hunts Point), which has been central to her artistic development and evolution. (The program even thanks Fratilli’s Pizza, a local, family-owned pizza shop where part of the performance was originally supposed to take place before a last-minute rescheduling led to a change of plans.)

I had been inspired by this community dimension of Pace’s work since she had asked me to collaborate on one of her pieces back in 2016, and I am struck by how Pace’s work brings together formal ambition, community practice, and a deep excavation of Bronx histories, unparalleled in the work of any writer/performer I know of, much less a Bronx native who still lives and works in the borough and whose life and work is so bound up with Hunts Point and the South Bronx more broadly. In our conversation, Pace also stressed the performance’s roots in group improvisational practices, such as asking permission from ancestors, listening to the performance spaces, and reacting to the landscapes of Hunts Point, as well as noticing and responding to the challenges posed by the park, a space without benches, garbage cans, or other amenities afforded other city parks. She also connected it to her practice of walking with her Lehman College honors students and to a workshop on archives she did with them. In that sense, she saw herself and her fellow performers not as embodying ancestors but as mere carriers of their memory, a crucial duty but one that links them to the everyday life of the neighborhood and city around them in a spirit of generosity and reciprocity.

Pace’s between wave and water feels like the work of a major artist in its full flowering, building on her own archivally-rich earlier works such as trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom, the 2016 piece on which I collaborated that explored racial ambiguity and the color line by way of the Alice Rhinelander case of 1925. (For this piece, Pace and I walked Rhinelander Avenue in a more suburban yet multicultural stretch of the central Bronx as a way of co-creating and supplementing Pace’s archival research on the Rhinelander case.) In a sense, between wave and water feels like the distillation of Pace’s method of “personalized study,” a term I borrow from Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s long running “exploration/excavation of African presences” (The Black Dancing Body, p. xiii) in books such as Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (1996). Like Gottschild, Pace is unafraid of the “dust of digging,” to echo Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s famous phrasing in his classic 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” Still, Pace’s work rejects a politics of evidence that simply, if crucially, fills an archival gap (as in Gottschild’s valuable collection of interviews, photographs, and biographies of Black performance luminaries). Instead, Pace’s work heeds Saidiya Hartman’s warning that we cannot dig our way out of racist histories and taxonomies since the archive itself is a site of Black death. In fact, I now notice the script of between wave and water begins with a famous quote from Hartman’s paradigm-shifting Lose Your Mother (2008) that reckons with “the afterlife of slavery”—one no archive could account for.

As a Black artist working from Hartman, Pace warns us of the traps of the archive, yet as a lifelong Bronxite she is fascinated by—and fascinates us with—the richness of the Bronx as a space of counter-archival possibility that demands to be properly historicized, especially given the Manhattan and Brooklyn hegemony of the arts and culture sector and the consistent marginalization of working class, Black and brown New York, including those like herself with multigenerational histories in the city. This paradox—the need for archiving versus the trap of the archive—is powerfully embodied in between wave and water through a tricksterish poetics that plays with how bodies are both constrained and find ways of release. While witnessing between wave and water, I experienced that release as a kinetic energy bordering on giddiness, yet also an awareness of the precarity of my own joy and of the weight of the urban geographies around me as they shaped our personal and collective embodiment. Near the end, with my typical poet’s sentimentality, I nearly choked up when I saw waterfowl on the Bronx River and gulls above in the gray sky as the performers’ bodies imagined a future for themselves and for us together.