Choreographing Histories

This article explores an increasingly distinct tendency in Black feminist experimental film and video to turn to dance as a way of reimagining colonial histories, archives, and afterlives. In the works of Onyeka Igwe and The Otolith Group, a feminist impetus intersects with decolonial concerns as they speculatively sift through, and radically rework, the legacies of Britain’s imperialist histories, from the gestures of dance responding to colonial film archives in Igwe’s Sitting on a Man (2018), to the choreographic remediation of an enslaved woman’s testimony in The Otolith Group’s INFINITY Minus Infinity (2019). In these works, dance becomes a “portal” of transtemporal connection. It acts as a medium for articulating collective, matrilineal histories, especially histories of Black feminist resistance and insurrection. These choreo-historiographic gestures can be read in relation to what Saidiya Hartman describes as a “chorus”—a figure of collective reckoning, improvisation, and transformation.