Thomas F. DeFrantz, Chair of African and African American Studies and Professor of Dance and Theater Studies at Duke University
Why did you create this gathering focused on communities of colour and a gathering purposefully composed of a broad swath of cultural workers?
Working across difference has been crucial to my lifeblood as a person for as long as I can remember. I grew up as a queer African American Midwesterner, aware of the ways that difference meant figuring out another way to get something done – and would always require allies and friends who could help with the task. Now as a Professor in a huge research university, I have the opportunity to push this way-of-feeling forward in different modes. As an artist and someone who plans research symposia, I work with others in all sorts of unexpected connections. Thinking through curating alongside various researchers, artists, funders, and presenters seemed important and necessary, especially given the rise of academic programs in curatorial practice. I’m always curious about inflecting process afroFUTUREqueer; and placing queer people of color at the center of conversations about possibility. But more than that it’s really about working across difference, which for me is the ultimate opportunity of life.
Is creating and leading Configurations influencing your artistic work and/or other research and writings?
SLIPPAGE has several projects in production and development; these Configurations gatherings always influence our thinking-through of what we’re up to next. We’ve made a gallery-style work in response to Kara Walker’s Civil War series; that piece speaks differently to audiences of color than to others in purposeful and intentional ways. I’m performing in a work “…i made a mess…” that responds to our current political circumstance in the USA and the insistent return to the afterlives of slavery as an ontological fact for Black people here. Configurations gatherings encourage me to pay attention to the range of communities who attend our performances and inspire our interventions. Now, we think more carefully about the worlds we want to be in conversations with as we are making our creative inventions.
This year is the first time that Configurations will take place outside of Duke University - is there something in particular that you are looking forward to here?
Yes, we’re so glad to have partners in Canada and to push these conversations into different, uncomfortable spaces. We acknowledge that race operates in different ways in different locations and at different times, but these are definitely encounters that we all need to have, that can deepen our awarenesses and our practices as progressive, anti-racist, proto-feminist, anti-homophobic allies. We have so much work to do alongside each other to actually transform the discourses of difference. Allons-y!