Will Rawls
Will Rawls thinks of time, gesture, language, and Black performance as unstable terms that he manipulates to reimagine the world from a position of being racially marked. With an extremely slow and arduous form of stop-motion filmmaking, Rawls explores the limits, burdens, and abstractions of representation that coincide in a Black performer’s body. For Counterpublic 2023, REGULAR DEGULAR is a response to the disparate architectural, economic, and historical tensions that lie on the surface of St. Louis. These tensions exist because of, and are constantly reproduced by, an anti-Black formation of American cities that raze or renew neighborhoods based on their racial and economic make-up and use value.
REGULAR DEGULAR stars former Katherine Dunham dancer Heather Himes Beal as she moves through four sites that straddle the intersection of I-44 and Jefferson Avenue. The four locations (and its sites of presentation) are Johnnie Brock’s Dungeon Party Warehouse, McDonald’s, St. Louis Public Library (Barr Branch), and Lafayette Park United Methodist Church. Here, the porous and generous medium of dance becomes a tool that can connect places—not through the important but ultimately inadequate methods of writing down history but through the echoes of body-to-body knowledge that the dancer carries with them.
ABOUT the artist
Will Rawls is a multidisciplinary artist working with choreography, performance, video, sculpture, works on paper, and installation. He uses performance as a vehicle for reformulating perceptions and embodiments of Blackness in contemporary life. He has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, Creative Capital, MAP Fund, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, United States Artists, the Rauschenberg Foundation, MacDowell, and several universities and museums. He lectures widely and publishes his writing in academic and community contexts.
