The Brooklyn Rail

Hands and knees connected with the floor, four dancers sing the letter “O.” They face inward, and, as they come to their feet, begin a slow, rhythmic walk toward each other, accompanied by an undulation moving from their hips to their arms and hands. Their once-small circle soon opens, bringing the rest of the room into its embrace.

This is a scene from dance artist Brianna Mims’s latest project, Marooning Bodies. The dancers, gathered at the 2024 Women in Dance Leadership Conference, have designed this short movement phrase as a ritual to reset when dealing with conflict, helping them to return to community and to one another. But this dance won’t become part of a traditional performance—Marooning Bodies is actually a game.

Mims designed Marooning Bodies to help players imagine societies they’d like to live in. As participants play, they explore questions related to their community’s decision-making processes, resource distribution, rituals, and responses to harm. Creativity and engagement with the five senses are woven throughout gameplay. Specially concocted scents evoke different climates and landscapes, and the game’s questions stimulate taste, touch, and movement, in addition to thought. Marooning Bodies culminates in the creation of an artifact—either a song, dance, poem, or story—that exists within the newly imagined society. Even the game’s presentation, in a box designed as a “time capsule from the future” and built by woodworker Kia McCormick, is tactile.

“As a dancer, something that is really important to me is this concept of ‘whole-body dreaming,’” Mims says.

Mims began creating Marooning Bodies in 2020, when she was a Toulmin Fellow through a partnership between Brooklyn’s National Sawdust and New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts. Her fellowship fell during the height of COVID lockdowns, so the Los Angeles–based artist couldn’t physically be in New York City. Uninspired by the idea of creating a dance film confined to her apartment, she began reflecting on a past project, #jailbeddrop, which combined performance with an interactive installation designed to facilitate conversations surrounding the US’s approach to prisons and the justice system.

“I love seeing people grapple together, and I love to create very interactive ways to give people different access points into different conversations,” Mims says. Although much of her work focuses on the justice system from an abolitionist framework, Mims adds that Marooning Bodies isn’t designed to push that point of view—or any point of view. “I’m not really interested in teaching or pushing an ideology. Something about this approach feels like what people need right now.”

Dance has long been used to navigate conflict and inspire change. In 1970s New York City, hip-hop emerged as an important tool for communities of color facing great upheaval and poverty. And, when Native Americans were forced to assimilate after the arrival of white settlers in North America, the Ghost Dance, which originated in the Paiute tribe and spread to other communities, helped affirm values of nonviolence while also serving as a tangible ritual of resistance.

Dance artist Dana Caspersen, who played an early version of Marooning Bodies when the game was still in development, has been at the forefront of codifying this work. Choreographic thinking, she says, acknowledges that “we’re always shaping every interaction, and a lot of those decisions are physically based.” In the real world, she adds, societal decisions like those explored in Marooning Bodies are being made unconsciously—but are also viewed as concrete. “Conflict is a space of action and decision-making. Our systems are mobile, even though oftentimes they can feel really stuck.”

Marooning Bodies—which was named both for the maroon societies formed by escapees of the transatlantic slave trade and a quotation¹ by one of Mims’s favorite thinkers, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe—was developed over a five-year period. During this time, Mims facilitated a robust playtest phase that brought the game to universities including NYU and the University of Southern California (Mims is a graduate of USC’s Kaufman School of Dance), California’s Norco prison, and a college preparatory program in Morocco. Currently, Mims is pitching her game as a teambuilding exercise and connection tool to a variety of cultural institutions, social justice nonprofits, and schools. This summer she taught a class based on the game at a performing arts family camp, and in the early fall, she facilitated a session for artists of all disciplines at a public park in Los Angeles.

John Njoroge, who participated in a Marooning Bodies playtest that took place on Zoom and included participants from all over the world, describes coming to the session with both open-mindedness and a few questions. As a formerly incarcerated person, Njoroge says he was skeptical about whether it would be possible to truly design a society while keeping everyone’s perspectives in mind. He says he left the session feeling encouraged.

“By starting with the question of ‘What do you imagine something to look like?,’ it makes everyone’s answer okay. It’s like sitting at a roundtable,” he says. “All the participants had disparate views and attitudes and backgrounds, and instead of that being a drawback, I saw it as a noted strength.”

This sense of diversity among participants was by design, Mims says. “We wanted to play with cross-cultural exchange—with what’s included in the game, but also through bringing drastically different groups of people together to play.”

In this spirit, Marooning Bodies includes challenges designed to highlight differences—and work through them. For example, during the game, players draw adaptation cards, which play on the concept of biomimicry. One adaptation card focuses on lekking, when male birds dance as a group to impress and attract female mates. Groups who draw this card choreograph a signature dance for which their community is known and decide on a specific purpose for this dance. “This encourages players to learn from the nonhuman world, but also helps us imagine outside our own reality,” Mims says.

Though Njoroge uses “utopia” when describing his initial skepticism about the project, the word is notably absent from the rest of the discourse surrounding Marooning Bodies. That’s because it’s not about creating a perfect society. It’s about resolving conflict, charting common ground, and encouraging wholehearted exploration of—and belief in—a future that’s different from our present. Marooning Bodies is a practice in fractal theory. By starting small, skills developed through managing interpersonal differences might begin to have an impact on larger, global differences, too.