For the film, a collaboration with composer Everett Saunders and cameraman Suzi Sadler, Brooks also thought of “Moby-Dick”. However, the main focus has been on the black body throughout history.
Whales “carry all of these toxins because of their bacon,” Brooks said. “There is a completely different aspect that has led me to how many black bodies died from Covid and how many toxins black bodies carry, whether it is trauma or whether they live near fallow land or the cost the poverty. I felt that the whale body is very similar to the black body. “
For Ali Rosa-Salas, the program director at Abrons, virtual work has its advantages with such dark themes: the viewer is responsible. “You can pause if you need to, you can play, you can come back to it,” she said. “It takes a slow pace to process grief and all the emotions that are supposed to arise in connection with what Mayfield’s research will produce.”
Brooks, who calls her practice improvising, while Black, a roof that encompasses both teaching and choreography and dance, finds connections between “Whale Fall” and “Letters to Marsha,” an earlier work based on danced and written notes to Marsha P. based. Johnson, the transgender activist whose body was found in the Hudson River in 1992.
“I think a lot about their bodies in the Hudson River and the cellular existence of bodies in the water,” said Brooks. “Like even if the body breaks down, the cells can still survive” and the idea that “their molecular structure may have communicated with some of the whales that surfaced in the bay last year.”
Recently, 50-year-old Brooks spoke about an artist’s lonely life during the pandemic, the black body, the whales, and somehow the whole point: that there is life in decomposition. Here are edited excerpts from that interview.
