The Biased Body is a research project that explores racism as a physical practice. Considering myself an open-minded, leftist supporter of equality and human rights, I was wondering why those rotten patterns of thought keep appearing in my mind. I started observing myself mindfully to figure out what happens in the first instant of an encounter with a BIPoC. What I discovered was shocking. Rather than prejudices I would call it erroneous convictions, as the former still implies the act of placement and classification (equally severe if unreflected), while the latter feels like a stable status description. Obviously, with the blink of an eye, my cognition steps in with corrections. But this little moment between the first gaze and the „deployment“ of respect strikes me. My provisional conclusions was that those resentments and stereotypes are part of a „somatic memory“ that traces back to colonialism and that is passed on ever since.

The body as an instrument

While writing this text I went through my notebook and found this short aphorism: „If the body is an instrument and racism is the score, we shall no longer talk about the musicians. We need to play a different piece. And to do so, we need to identify all the tunes – the hateful ones as well as the progressives.“ The mentioned process of identifying tunes is the main goal of that project. There is no such thing as bodiless discrimination – the body is the target as well as the perpetrator of racial injustice. Even hate speech on social media requires a certain physical practice such as typing and exposing oneself to a screen. That makes racism a social choreography. History can’t be rewritten, choreographies can.

The sickness that is whiteness

 Now, one might argue that this choreography is only being performed in relation to or even together with non-white people. That is problematic. It is a solo dance, as it objectifies the people it addresses. It converts them into mere scenery. A solo dance needs to be revisited by the dancers performing it – the dancers who are white, the dancers who are „trained“. In other words: White people need to talk about themselves. Apart from the focus on the physicality behind racist behavior, the second baseline for this project is an emphasis on whiteness as a phenomenon detached from non-white identities.

The assumption that whiteness only works in relation to blackness / coloredness suggests that there is no such thing as an independent „white identity“. Whiteness is a social construct as much as blackness and all the other racial terms. But, unlike the others, it operates furtively and its power rarely gets questioned. I chose to perform alone to challenge my own whiteness on stage without instrumentalising and re-exposing the people who are affected by it. The underlying hope is the very idealistic and deliberately naive hope that Whiteness needs the presence of the other races to survive. So, being left with itself, the concept of whiteness might die. And if it dies, racial discrimination might vanish as well. I know that this is a gross simplification, and yet it is helpful for clarifying intentions and developing ideas.

In preparation for the project, I came across an instagram post by the black US-american activist Sonya Renee Taylor. In her statement, she refers to a young girl in a youtube video arguing with her parents. The father shows his disdain for black people while the girl named Haley does her best to proof him wrong, drawing upon the notion of equality. Taylor argues that this debate is a symptom of what she calls „the sickness that is whiteness“. And she does not refer solely to the ignorance of the parents. She speaks about the girl:

“Haley was having a conversation about Black people. Haley was arguing with her parents about whether or not Black people were worthy of life. The fact that that is a conversation is the problem… Whiteness and white people are so bereft of humanity that they will have a conversation about whether another group of people deserves to live.” White people need to start talking about whiteness and stop ignoring the fact that “Black people are not suffering at an amorphous blob called the system. Black people are suffering at the hands of whiteness and white people who live inside the delusions of white supremacy construct systems and structures to enact the delusions of white supremacy.”

The tale of the never-ending encounter

To sum up, this project aims to develop a choreography that uses movement vocabulary resulting from my research around white bodies and their way of facing BIPoC. I’ve been looking for gestures, microagressions, gazes, qualities and so forth. On the following page you will get a glimpse into the methods I used to accumulate the material. My initial idea was to stage an encounter between a black and a white body and to stretch that above mentioned short moment of bias. I wanted to apply a performative magnifier to expose the physical manifestations of discrimination. Around 70 percent of our communication is nonverbal. Thus, in a logocentric society it is particularly necessary to shed a light on the messages our bodies convey. But I realized soon that I was interested in finding various messages of different kinds. So I let the idea of an infinite one-to-one meeting go and decided to develop a set of different micro-encounters with various modes of coping. And – of course – instead of literally meeting a black performer on stage, I am only meeting myself.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to having this opportunity and my greatest thanks go to „Fonds Darstellende Künste“ (German Funds for Performing Arts) and their program „#takecare“. I was able to learn so much from this process and I am sure it can be helpful for future projects I will be involved in. Also, I want to express my honest gratitude to the dearest Henry Lyonga who was always there for me to provide important information and opinion. Finally, I acknowledge the contributions of all my friends, colleagues and experts.

Some doubts and a disclaimer

It is important to note that all of the content shown on this website is deeply subjective and results from an art project rather than a scientific research. It can be read like a blog, but I preferred to reflect on the assembled material before I disclose some of the results. If you are a BIPoC and you read / see something inappropriate on those pages, please contact me, you can find the link down there in the footer.

About me

My name is Markus Posse. I am a Berlin-based dramaturg, performance artist and theoretician. Since my graduation from Performance Studies I’ve been interested in peace and violence as performative phenomena. Both my art and my writing focus on physical narratives, the process of ritualization and the performativity of power. To know more, feel free to visit my website under www.markusposse.de or use the contact form below.