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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.
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.
