scenes from the site of memory

EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING [2023] daughter's gaze, mother's movement, light, shadow.

monument no. 1 [performance still, 2023]: aspiration, recall, repetition, prayer, haunt.

currently, I am composing and orchestrating an opera whose prologues operate as installed performances forged within the playspace of the organic line.

notes on the architecture of memory, opacity, the American South, and the Black maternal project.

[2022-23]

from the 'Prologue'

in the studio

I conceive that the fugitive space, these sites of maroonage, are coded by the necessarily speculative Black maternal.
I imagine these as holy, terrifying, brilliant, bloody, dissonant, emancipatory, soulful.
A perilous ecology, Blackness.
I am writing toward this.
As I consider that Black matrilineal rhetoric, I thus encounter a maternal grammar (system of thought), an agreement of patterns in the infinite tense = to be.
These poem-bodies are non-linear, improvisational, performative space sculptings.
I say, a perilous ecology, Blackness.

recent time-based work

ON GOD [performance cycle: 2021-22] skin, rock, greens, sweat, hair, circles, song, fat, rainfall, Blue Ridge highlands.

a NOW NOW collaboration

Stage Direction & New Work Development

Ragtime, 2018

behind-the-scenes of Sweat, 2020

Director of New Works, Live Arts

guiding research + teaching terminology

— critical erotics

after Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic” – a sensual, bodily, innately spiritual power; life force of perpetuation, of organic creative energy; that which is superficially encouraged and inferiorized; that which is consumed as suspect, as virtue, as lone worth, as commodifiable, shippable subjugation; particularly sensation endowed with feeling, anti-self-negation, the anti-pornographic: chaotic self, kink self as aspirational, safe self; examination/s of liberation through lens/es of interiority and full access to feeling such that demand is placed upon societal structures to uphold that revelry for our children and our children’s children; “a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered” (Lorde, 3); the bridge between spiritual and political; “the nurturer and nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge” (Lorde, 4); anti-patriarchal consciousness.
after Fred Moten, [In the Break] – a chosen subjectivity by objectified bodies in a system of degradation and oppression; a resistance on the part of the object, “the irreducible sound of necessarily vital performance(s) at the scene of objection/s” (Moten, 1); a locatable polarity to the casual, routine, familiar ‘terrible spectacles’ of Black suffering; a performance of refusal to participate in scenes of brutality; an invocation of objectification on part of Black ‘objects of knowledge,’ specifically those regenerating the Black object of knowledge.
after Chan, [A Time Apart] – “time that saturates time,” the idea that “time can be fulfilled and made anew through a…rupture of some kind” (Chan, 53); an unmaking, “barely recognizable form, the discordant truth” (Chan, 54); a vitality, lethality, a vulnerability; mortality, and its homeland; an inhabitance of demise; an inevitability; “a desperate immanence” (Chan, 55); a seizure of rhythm, a percussive constancy; the unrestrained irreconcilable, a radiant abandonment; a joint made and unmade in breaking; anti-consolation, comfortlessness, a disappearance from which we go on.

— Sankofic attunement

Expanding attunement to interior acoustic intervals in which the listener greets themselves according to spatio-temporal circumstances, one’s social geography, and sonic sensibilities as relating to doubt, belonging, and other matters of phenomenological self-conception; a primary act of Sankofa; an auditory hallucination and performance of reality augmentation as governed by perceived legacies; an antioppressive interrogation of settler ideology and listening positionalities through attentive materialization of unspoken and otherwise gagged ethnological brilliance; a performative gesture, somatic or spectral, of/toward the self through refractions of memory and other hauntings. See also: motherhood, sometimes.

— imperative aliveness

after Kevin Quashie, [Black Aliveness, or Poetics of Being] – indisputable, enduring; “the operating assumption…in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness” (Quashie, 7); worldmaking in the midst of witness, of Black being, in cosmological arc, in quotidian magnificence; beingness as aliveness as necessary Blackness as invocation as we-ness as non-reply as totality; deviation from anti-Blackness as center of thinking; Afrofuturistic logic/s and frameworks linking Black bodies and organic wild (trans*corporeality) generating irrefutable lineage and necessarily centering the Black matrilineal imagination (cc: Hortense J. Spillers, Alice Walker) and vernacular as expert in its breadth of conception, especially in object-demand; refusal of nonbeing; wayward opacity as process by which we surpass terror as “uninflected language” (Quashie, 16); a becoming.

Excerpted Bibliography

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adrienne jacobson oliver

…works with words, time, proximity, breath, silence. Often, this is on the page or stage, or at home, or about town. Adrienne concerns herself with repetition, juxtaposition, intimacy. Always, she is a mother, educator, curator. Adrienne tends some wounds, nurtures some souls. Her work is to become a worthy ancestor. Adrienne often weeps, sighs, observes. Adrienne has been here and there. Adrienne serves as Director of New Works for Live Arts Theater in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lives with her child in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Recent works have appeared in and been supported by the Virginia Film Festival, Puerto del Sol Black Voices series, The Night Heron Barks, Plentitudes, McGuffey Art Center, Second Street Gallery, and PEN America, where she was a 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow. Publications and works are forthcoming from Apogee Journal and Burnaway Magazine, where she is a 2023 Art Writing Incubator fellow. Adrienne thanks mentors D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Pamela Sneed, Chet’la Sebree, Roya Marsh, Kevin Everson, and Daniel Quiles for their ferocity, unwavering challenge, criticality, and imagination…