Exploring the Histories of Black Sites

The South is abundant with antebellum and postindustrial structures and spaces that invoke the inextricable legacies of slavery and white supremacy. But to engage with those spaces meaningfully, and to overcome the erasure that has so pervasively affected Black history, requires information, context, and access that isn’t easily available to the public. The South Carolina and Chicago–based Wideman Davis Dance company believes that dance helps tell the layered stories of Black spaces throughout time. Many of these spaces, rich with historical insights, continue to be fluid and active in the communities where they sit, but are rarely memorialized.

To address this gap in our historical understanding, Wideman Davis Dance created Migratuse Ataraxia, an interactive dance-based performance that was staged in a building on a former plantation in Harpersville, Alabama. A grant from Mellon supported Wideman Davis Dance to expand upon the Migratuse model with residencies in cities across the South that involve local communities and engage live audiences in intimate antebellum histories told through dance.

The company was in residence in Selma, Alabama, throughout the summer and fall of 2022. Architectural sites that speak to Black life during the Civil Rights Movement provided backdrops for a series of multidisciplinary outdoor performances. Co-directors Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis spoke to dozens of community members throughout the residency.

“Some people may have this perspective that it always has been hell and there’s a traumatic narrative around Selma,” Wideman-Davis told the Selma Times Journal. “But ... there’s so much richness here. I knew that by having conversations, we could fold some of those pleasure moments into the performances.”

Both ephemeral and participatory, Wideman Davis Dance’s work is reimagining what a monument can be.