Contemplative Performance Art as a Practice to Expand the Window of Tolerance in Confronting Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias
By Devora Neumark
By Way Of An Introduction
As a second-generation Holocaust survivor and interdisciplinary artist, I’ve developed a 30-year praxis exploring the ways that contemplative performance art serves to interrupt the intergenerational traumas associated with genocide, colonialism, climate change, and environmental injustice. This research-creation process has changed me in profound and unexpected ways. Contemplative performance art, by which I mean any performance art practice that cultivates awareness and multisensory perception, can be a pathway to healing, however much this pathway is not easy or straightforward.
Toni Cade Bambara’s Minnie Ransom character opens the 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, with the question: Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Prior to publishing The Salt Eaters, Bambara wrote about the Black liberation movement. Bambara’s reasoning was that change and liberation “begins with the self, in the self. The individual, the basic revolutionary unit, must be purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart, that hazard the next larger unit – the couple or pair, that jeopardize the still larger unit – the family or cell that put the entire movement in peril.” In the book, healer Minnie Ransom, continues to caution Velma Henry following Henry’s suicide attempt: “I like to caution folks, that’s all. […] No sense us wasting each other’s time, sweetheart. […] A lot of weight when you’re well.” The truth of this still resonates with me in every fiber of my being. It is not a simple or easy thing to embrace wellness, or, perhaps more specifically, the responsibility of wellness. Over time, I have found that my capacity to carry this weight of wellness with grace and strength has increased. I attribute a good part of growing that capacity to my contemplative performance art and my critical-somatic reflections on the work of other contemplative performance artists.
