How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up is an immersive, site specific, multidisciplinary installation and dance performance exploring the growth, use, and medicalization of cotton as a historical thread between Blackness and Disability in the U.S.
The piece utilizes an elaborate multimedia design, multiple Audio Descriptors, a multi vantage-point stage, and a performance structure that can reconfigure every night based on the performers’ changing needs.
Moving through the funhouse mirrored, public gaze that sensationalizes, commodifies, and pathologies Black and Disabled people How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up offers a spatiotemporal, spiritual, and somatic archiving and reclamation of the ways Black Disabled folks adapt, assemble, and love one another.
Caretakers of Land/Land Acknowledgement: The land currently known as The Bronx is the native land of Lenapehoking.