David Dabydeen's Turner from a Multimodal and Dance-Theatre Approach: The Arts, Literature and Dance

In an ever-increasing divided reality, in which incomprehension and boundaries are putting at risk our innate human capacity for love, care and understanding, the Humanities are interested in envisioning new transdisciplinary and intercultural dialogues for a more peaceful and resilient world. The encounter of scholarly research with the praxis of media and the arts are fundamental for re-reading Western-oriented epistemologies in the light of a more complex, fluid and respectful «partnership» existence. In my research, I engage in multimodal productions which mingle the poetic wor(l)d of post-decolonial writers from the «edge» with the gestural, iconic and embodied language of dance. This fusion of intertextual references and corporeal allusions brings to the fore new and unfathomed perspectives for both practitioners and viewers. The goal is to traverse disciplinary boundaries and embrace complex, «opaque» and much needed exchanges of possibilities, in a constant re-mapping of critical enquiry that destabilises, interrogates, and proposes… In this essay, I focus on David Dabydeen's Turner (1994), a long narrative poem in which the Guyanese author questions the representation of drowning black bodies in J.M.W. Turner's notorious painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840). My solo dance embodies Dabydeen's complex sketching of Turner, who becomes simultaneously the painter, the slave, the stillborn, the human who constantly changes his/her skin in order to become persecutor or victim, black or white. Dabydeen’s poem highlights a «tidalectic» discourse on the role of Western-European imperialism, thus allowing the renewal of our Atlantic archive from a more feminine and partnership-oriented dimension.