071426 / REHEARSING OTHERWISE
how do we wish to be inbetween?
REHEARSING OTHERWISE is a series where I share experiments in writing rooted in black study1. These are dispatches from the rituals of play I facilitate in my own writing practice, embodying disobedience (or, dis-embodying obedience)2 through methods of reading and writing Otherwise34. I publish these tangential5 drafts with commentary as a gesture toward the revision process.
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Untitled Movement Score
Dedicate your laughter.
What if creative6 embodiment was the non-nogotiable7?
Shrug (your shoulders), why not?
Repeat this until you relax into familiar choreography.
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For this journal entry, I composed a movement score that originally documented 2 times when I was driving around my area: once on a commute, and one that was more of a wander to pass the time. I found this documentation process to be a reminder that the inbetween space is not only generative but inevitable. How do we wish to be in it? I feel it might be an architecture that I can dialogue with. Most importantly, I remembered the desire for it to be a play space.
This has not been an easy realization by any means. I lost my inspiration8 to write movement scores for a few months. I didn’t realize the car or the road could be a space for writing. One definition of score is a framework for unplanned movement9. During these drives, I knew where I was going, taking familiar streets to familiar destinations. But perhaps more psychologically I was hoping to inspire spontaneity. I remembered I could record fragments that documented the moments when my attention shifted in ways I could not predict, always in response to the environment; an improvised layer to the choreography. And I needed to do this. I needed to follow a sense of improvisation because lately I have been so restricted to play’s outskirts. It’s felt harder to access, to really immerse into, because disobedience often comes with shame. I recognize the risk of prioritizing play when I shrink from sharing my weird adventures for fear of judgement. I often feel invaded by the perception of not being ‘productive enough’ in a society where productivity is a performance of self-worth. So, to recover some sense of wandering (which is to say, wayward moving, which is to say disobedient writing) means there are other options for how we move, uncharted paths that may be better suited for fulfilling one’s desires.
And maybe the container of a movement score can hold this: a practice for composing tangents into the worlds that those uncharted paths make possible; a framework for a choreography that moves us away from shame’s punishing capacity to suffocate play. If it can, then I trust my practices of rehearsing otherwise in inbetween spaces as a way of finding out.
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Thanks for witnessing my rehearsal,
Paris
“…there is a distinction to be made between black studies and black study. Despite its radical origins, Black Studies as an academic discipline is now assimilated into the corporate university and too often reduced to performative reform. Alternatively, study is ‘a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you.’ As a mode of practice, as Stefano Harney puts it, study is happening with and against the university and, most importantly, outside the university…I would posit that black study is the practice of refusal of Western civilization.“ — djones, Black Study as Practice: Claiming the B-Side as Black Study. (2023). ↩
“There remains some aspect of my speaking that expects a different mode of expression than English provides…This comes from a desire to resist assimilation, but equally, it arises out of a sense of exploration or adventure, a sense of puzzlement: as if something has happened to my occupation of the language, where a kind of split occurs. I move through it and see myself moving at the same time. It’s a double consciousness, a questioning that simultanates my rendering of experience.“ — Renee Gladman, The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture ↩
I came into the concept and praxis of ‘Reading Otherwise’ through Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Keynote on Visibility for Center of Book Arts 2022 Conference. ↩
“I think these ideas of world building really gives this freedom of also trusting what you already know and what you're already carrying, but also try to imagine other ways of being together, or other ways of encountering something. …thinking about alternative histories that is not through the lens of colonialism…there’s always a possibility to think of other ways of being together.” — Sandra Mujinga, “"I cheer for the monsters." | Artist Sandra Mujinga | Louisiana Channel.“ (2023). ↩
“A tangent can be a generative digression that invites learning or an abrupt change in course that introduces you to new ideas. Tangents are not mistakes rather, they are offerings…A tangent is a form of waywardness…” — Kameelah Janan Rasheed for Orange Tangent Study ↩
“The political theorist and healer Anita Chari says that ‘creativity is the ability to sit in the space of not-knowing and not shut it down or try to control it.’” — Susan Jahoda & Caroline Woolard. Making & Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, & Circulation in the Visual Arts. Pioneer Works Press. Published 2020. ↩
“I have decided my desire is non-negotiable, my belonging is not up for debate, outsourcing my erotic power is not an option and compromising my values is radically unacceptable. I believe them because I operate from a framework of Radical Unacceptance. Operating from the assumption that compromising our values is no longer an option is a life long practice. It’s a long ladder of practicing inside little truths that inform our daily decisions. We actualize our desire with uncompromising clarity on our values through a series of small steps. This is what black feminism has taught me, how to be an unwilling collaborator in one’s own death.” — Ayana Zaire Cotton. “Radical Unacceptance.” Seeda School. https://seedaschool.substack.com/p/radical-unacceptance. Published 5 May 2026. ↩
Remember what Octavia Butler had said! ↩
Stopgap Dance Company. “How to Improvise in Contemporary Dance | Groundwork | Home Practice (Inclusive Online Dance Class).” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXmRPze4GD4. Published 8 September 2020. ↩