Photos by Emily Farthing.

MOMMA i RODE THE BEAST!

, 2023

Conceived, Scored and Performed by Jordan Deal

Live Sound by Kwami Winfield and Jim Strong

Curated by Malcom X. Betts & Arien Wilkerson for Black Aesthetics

MOMMA i RODE THE BEAST! is a hyper meta-physical dive into the indulgences of undercurrents, dark matter, and worlds that shapes our social and political landscapes, and stores itself in BODY. Through a series of metamorphoses through the Matrilineage Mother, the Young Boul as the Fool, and the Saint, the story takes on a queer necromantic wrestling inquisition with the BULL OF CHAOS. In this stretched time and space, Jordan Deal questions the fugitivity to come thereafter~after it’s rode good.

This work was curated by Malcolm X. Betts and Arien Wilkerson as part of Black Aesthetics for Judson Arts Wednesdays.

Jordan Deal has been using their interdisciplinary practice to further investigate and develop Chaos Force, a current that sits between two polarized magnetic forces (codependent to each other) that propels matter through a vacuum out of their orbit. Deal has been working with this idea amongst reflections between State and Order, social and political revolutions, dialectics, and have become interested in what situations, actions, and approaches can be transformed into subversive material which disrupts duality/oppositionality and offers a radically new approach to performance ideology, language, and social relations. This work expands on the ideas of Èdouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relations, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, and Denise F.

As a methodology, Deal explores the way Chaos Force, within the parameters and loose structures of intentionality, can produce profound resolutions that cannot be found through Western epistemologies of Logics and Reason. This consists of improvisation, imagination, reparative violence, free jazz, collective gathering, dancing, contradictions, amongst many other technologies.

In the performance, MOMMA i RODE THE BEAST!, Jordan Deal takes the idea of Chaos Force and situates it into the architecture and beings, to physically, mentally, and emotionally wrestle with its potential consequences and potentiality. Other modalities they explore in their practice are urban mythology, esoteric knowledge, artifacts of memory, blackness as creative destruction, the undeaddead, channeling, and video/film documenta. Using the structures Deal is developing through Chaos Force as a methodology, the performance is both scored and improvised, producing the potential for different emotional, spiritual, and physical encounters between themself and the material–as well as with the unseen presences at a given site.

Violence is also a central question within the work–investigating its capabilities and regenerative deconstructionism, along with its harmful and dispossessive qualities when applied toward poetics of relations & differences and the areas inbetween, mostly between State violence and liberatory resistance towards it. The Mother in the work acts not just as motherhood and specifically my mother, but Primordial Mother and the memories, histories, blood and genocide She (the earth) holds from colonial and state violence. There are eruptions of eroticism and excessive love that are uncomfortably weaved within and alongside aggressive violent & gorey acts throughout the performance–dancing and making love to the Bull (a friend, an enemy, a lover); a birth (or multiple births) that is followed by the devouring of a baby; and the multiple deaths that is witnessed and taken place of the performer themselves. I am interested in the relationship we have with violence to understand the ways it is used to dispossess and oppress communities and when it is used to deconstruct already violent structures and systems protecting the active violences of the oppressor/state. Also in the ways harm shows up in interpersonal relationships vs the way pain can be something sexy and pleasureable when it is intentionally and carefully engaged with.

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