In How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up, Kayla Hamilton explores lineages of Black disabled imagination and alternative world-building through an immersive, community-specific, multidisciplinary dance performance.
The performance moves through three historical spaces—the cotton field, the Black church and the freakshow/circus—where disability was hidden, deemed unproductive, reduced to spectacle or asked to be prayed away. How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up offers an archival exploration of these spaces and a reclaiming of agency, recentering the parts of the self that were discarded or suppressed in those settings while carrying forward the ancestral task of envisioning a future where every-body is free.
The production makes use of multiple audio descriptors and a performance structure that can reconfigure every night based on the performers’ changing needs.
Part of The Shed's Open Call.
