Wild Beauty

Author: Gabrielle Civil

Publisher: Dance Notes (2023)

Wild Beauty (What happens if we take our time?) documents a creative process dilated, made possible really, by a forced pause. Dramatizing preparation for a performance (“Preparation for ritual is ritual,” as Civil has held elsewhere) on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2020, Wild Beauty highlights the erotics of dreaming with an epistolary-notational approach to collaboration and improvisation focused on “generating new performance gestures, exploring themes of diverse blackness, belonging, heritage, queerness, grief, medicine, and joy.” Written before, after, amid, and around her 2022 book the dėjà vu, this chaplet collects notes, omissions, iterations, revisions, fruits, flowers, and invitations to rest, and rise, in concerted motion.