After the Soft Ones: Environmental Improvisation in South Africa and the US South

After the Soft Ones draws together black improvisational performances from South Africa and the southern United States, garnering unique insight into the environmental legacies of settler colonialism and racial oppression through diasporic study. Recognizing improvisational practices’ heightened responsiveness to environmental conditions, it amplifies the critical redress of performances that emerge directly from the impossibility of separating complex lived experience and ecological effect.

By looking across the two “Deep Souths” of South Africa and the Southern US, the exceptionalism that shrouds both of their racial histories is contended, while the robust dialogue of their creative innovations is thrown into relief. After the Soft Ones spans improvisational works in dance, devised theater, film, performance art, land art, free jazz, and social practice by Ralph Lemon, Chuma Sopotela, Beverly Buchanan, Zim Nqawana, Kemang wa Lehulere, Gladys Thomas, Gladys Mgudlandlu, Ilze Wolff, Herman Wallace, Jackie Sumell, and Workshop71. Through granular study of artistic processes, it demonstrates that the spatial effects of racial capitalism in South Africa and the US South (displacement, dispossession from means to subsistence, segregation, and incarceration) have produced an intergenerational depth of black environmental thinking that surfaces in contemporary improvisational practices.

This timely bridge between performance studies, black studies, and the environmental humanities uniquely situates performance as an environmental discourse. Voicing the unnamed, but nonetheless crucial, term “environment” in the development of performance studies as a field and regional histories of black improvisational practice, it develops an original framework for conceptualizing environment on simultaneously ecological and humanist registers.



Images from research travels in Makhanda, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisianna and Georgia.




*These are undergraduate courses I’ve designed and taught. 

Performance of the City

New York — a city that is famed for its diverse performance forms, and that seems to endlessly perform itself. In this course we utilize Performance Studies’ unique attunement to space to interrogate how the city and its performances create and affect each other. We pay particular attention to experimental forms that have emerged directly from New York from the 1960’s on, as well as studying the city itself as an ongoing performance. How do particular spatial and social structures enable, or disable, performance? How does performance transform an environment? Our attentiveness to the spatial is accompanied by a deep historical awareness — in many of our sessions we will take a “palimpsest” look at a particular site, exploring the layers of history and transformation that have formed it. Together we will experiment with ways of paying attention to the city, and explore New York physically (getting out and doing things!), creatively, and philosophically. 

Environmental Performance

The late 1960s saw the concurrent emergence of the modern environmental movement and the outpouring of performance and art into public and natural spaces, accompanied by the development of performance studies as a critical field. In this interdisciplinary course, we will study the interdependence of environment and performance, contemplating the role that performance plays in activating environment as a discursive site and the ways that environmental conditions animate performance in quotidian and artistic spheres. Our reading will combine contemporary scholarship in the environmental humanities and performance studies, building a solid grounding in both, while discovering new lines of inquiry in their intersections. Queer, feminist, black, disabled, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and indigenous perspectives guide our investigation into topics that include embodiment, speciation, spatiality, technicity, and the dissolution of received categories such as “art,” “culture,” “nature” and “the human.” Through close engagement with a diversity of performance forms, and attention to our own environmental relations, we will come to understand “environment” as a performative force on multiple scales and develop creative and critical tools for articulating this. Together we will explore the ways that artists embrace, disrupt, praise, reveal, or reconfigure environment’s performative capacity, as well as conduct some environmental performance experiments of our own.

Performance Theory

In this course we will simultaneously theorize performance and perform theory, exploring such questions as: How is theory performative? How does performance generate theory? How is performance always already theoretically active? How can a performance lens help us to read and generate theory? We will ground our discussion both in “canonical” performance studies texts, as well as a diverse range of performative “objects” including novels, plays, interviews, films, and photographs. An emphasis on queer, black and anticolonial thinking will help us to question the locus and even the very notion of theoretical authority, while exploring how these thinkers employ performance and performative tools in their work. We will also generate and play with a range of approaches for “doing” performance theory, including “thick descriptions,” poetry, free writing, performance actions, and practical exercises and experiments.


Assemblages of city waste made during a class activity in “Performance of the City,” 2023.