Practices in The Wake: An Ontological Entanglement | A Signature Talk featuring Choreographer, Dancer, Artist & Activist nia love
We were proud to present Practices in The Wake: An Ontological Entanglement , a signature talk featuring choreographer, dancer, artist and activist nia love at Rutgers New-Brunswick on March 10, 2025.
Introduction by:
Sasha Ann Panaram, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Associate and Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Fellow in English Rutgers-New Brunswick
The talk was moderated by:
Christina Knight, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Named Term Chair and Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice and Art History, Rutgers New-Brunswick
Abstract of the talk:
I am liberated by the incompleteness of practice, rather than the absolute perfection of the resolved.
Practicing is the power of adaptability. Through collective improvisation and listening, it allows us to breathe together, to care for one another in the most disastrous of times. How can dance offer us collective creative practices for building new ways of escape? This act of assemblage can be witnessed as mapping macro and micro coordinates of space and time in the body.
At the water’s edge and in the depths of the ocean, ecology elicits networks and mappings that synchronize our efforts to find, what I’d like to call, the “intra-human” dance–the dance that has always been inside of us as we floated deep within the waters of our mother’s womb. Our homespace. Can this beginning dance of sorts continue to teach us the violation of the boundaries of home is a clue to our continued elusion of sovereign brutality?
My latest project, g1(host):lostatsea, is a serial, multi-media performance and research platform, marking my continuous engagement with the memory, prolonged histories, and “afterlives” of transatlantic slavery. This work pursues questions regarding my body's status within historical, geographical and atmospheric limits, and pivots on this fundamental query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect? I sift through themes of loss, alchemy, geological debris, and generational accretions, to trace a dense, energetic nothingness. Here, “wake work,” as scholar Christina Sharpe asserts, operates as a mode of suspension, a sensory field of historical being, an oceanic black thing that we’re all drenched by and in.
Photo Credit: Orion Gordon
About the artist:
nia love is a three-time Bessie award-winning choreographer, performer, teaching artist, Mother, and deep sea diver. She is a recent awardee of the prestigious Alpert Award and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and New England Foundation For The Arts award. She is an inaugural recipient of several distinguishing fellowships in dance, including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2019), Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellowship at Maggie Allesee National Center For Choreography, Tallahassee, FL (2019-2020); a Gibney DiP Dance in Process Residency at Gibney Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, New York, NY (2019) among many more.
Her latest work UNDERcurrents serial multimedia work g1(host):lostatsea (2015-present) investigates the ocean as a site of knowledge and memory, scrutinizing the “afterlife” of slavery and what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect. Continuing this body of work, her project UNDERcurrents had its first iteration at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA (2021). This spring 2025, nia love is continuing to engage in archival research and rehearsal in preparation for her premiere of UNDERcurrents at Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts (MoFA) in 2026. Investigating histories of transatlantic slavery, this fully-immersive performance and art exhibition will feature her late father’s work, Ed Love (sculptor and FSU professor), and offer critical reflections from several world-renowned authors including Fred Moten and Christina Sharpe within the catalogue publication and further public programming. In March, she will be delivering a lecture and embodied workshop at the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University on her project UNDERcurrents, and has completed the Yale Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement (CARE) grant proposal. She will be conducting international archival research on the transatlantic slave
trade in Bristol and Liverpool (UK) this summer. nia love is an Associate Professor at Florida State University.