“You Sometimes Sounding like You”

Abstract In choreographer Will Rawls's collaboration with poet Claudia Rankine, What Remains, which toured nationally in 2016 – 21 and in which the author was one of four performers, improvisation serves as a strategy for the playful and indeterminate navigation of categorizations and curtailments of Black living and dancing in the charged landscape of the theatrical stage. This collaboratively constructed choreography was made up of tightly honed vocal and bodily improvisational scores using fragments and stanzas from Rankine's poetry, alongside physical practices of shapeshifting, repetition, and the sounding body. Detailed description of the opening section of the performance — especially an extended gamelike section called “The Already Dead Game” — is paired with theories of dance improvisation and Black thought, alongside the author's reflections during rehearsals.