Black Atlantic Space-Time
Black Atlantic Space-Time
Unity
Drum Calls | Body recalls | Unity Atlantic Rhythm Map – 2024
About the artwork
Music, dance and image express a unifying consciousness of Black identity embodied in historic trauma and rhythm heritage. Through the dark paralysis of the Middle Passage, dance is spoken word. Through rhythms encoded in muscle memory, our collective body touches the cosmos – past, present, future.
Black Atlantic Space-Time is expressed in 2 formats – the narrative movie Drum Calls Body Recalls and the interactive Unity Map. Both assume a scientific premise of rhythm transmission through muscle memory rather than through DNA or ‘blood’. Slavery fragmented this heritage, creating new drum-dance circles of innovation.
Ritual transmits Afrodiasporic knowledge as ‘rhythm codes’ that synchronise image, sound, dance and spoken language into expressions of identity and belonging.
By turning towards ancestral knowledge, Black Atlantic Space-Time reaches for a decolonised future.
The creative process
This art emerges from multimedia dance research and Kamau Brathwaite’s poem, Caliban.
Unity is a container created by Deirdre Molloy for collaborations that flow from her PhD. Thanks to Project Manifest, Martiniquan dancer Aurélie Capelle-Sigère joins Unity. Co-producers include Code Your Future (UK) and Gerador (Portugal).
For Black Atlantic Space-Time, Deirdre is director, dancer, choreographer, sound designer, musical arranger, stylist, and audio-visual editor. Aurélie joined Deirdre in the studio for a year of rehearsals for singing and dancing roles in the project. Aurélie also assisted with ensemble choreography, wardrobe and vocals. The biggest production challenge was and is funding dance and music collaborations.
The Map features 17 short films by Deirdre, produced with Manifest and independently. This art is motivated by lived experience of Afrodescendant cultural statelessness and fragmentation. In reply to Eurocentric erasures, we embody Afrodiasporic unity through audio-visual narratives that honours our ancestors.
About the artists
Unity is Deirdre Molloy and Aurélie Capelle-Sigère for Project Manifest.
Deirdre Molloy has always been a social dancer, from Brooklyn parties to Bridgetown beaches, from the Zulu Nation in Geneva and to blues and jazz festivals of Australia and Europe. Since 2020 Deirdre researches Black Atlantic identity through dance ethnography and design. She is a PhD candidate and Danijela Memorial scholar at University College Cork. In 2022, Deirdre affiliated with CIPHER ERC, in cotutelle with University of Toulouse, France. Deirdre has degrees in Psychology, Multimedia and Ethnochoreology – the study of dance, movement and culture. Her research-creation websites, are designed to platform dance culture-bearer voices.
Aurélie Capelle-Sigère has been dancing since childhood, growing up between Afro-Urban American and Caribbean cultures. She enjoys the world of hip hop dance and is engaged in the issues of the representation of black people on the swing scene with a French collective (CVFC). Her performances reveal her various jazz influences. Her dance connects her cultures and her heritage, and honours her multiple roots.
