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“Surfacing”

The following two articles were published (by different newspapers) in quick succession: the first on August 8, the second on August 13. Both are about Durham.

I’ve supplied the lede sentences, and article links, for each below.

  • “Public school teachers, low-level city workers, even journalists can’t afford many, if not most, of the 2,400 new apartments and condos being built in central Durham.”

From “Durham development: What’s being built where and who can afford it?”, Lisa Sorg, Indy Week.

  • “Like firecrackers exploding around downtown Durham, clusters of small businesses are popping up and enlivening one desolate block after another.”

From “Surfacing: A Corner of Durham, N.C., Comes to Life”, Ingrid K. Williams, The New York Times.

Throughout the week of Project Change, it’s odd (and hard), pedagogically, to balance discussion about real-time events, trends, and articles with real-time personal immersion—in Durham, and within the group of 21 PChange students. After all, the students don’t have access to social media or personal technology (they could, hypothetically, pick up a newspaper somewhere). I found this particularly challenging, this past week, with the unfolding events in Ferguson, MO. These are events that touch on a multitude of interconnected issues—including race, justice, and the organization of public space—that continually and intentionally surface during Project Change, often in connection with students’ personal experiences.

That said, the above pairing of articles came up during a conversation about the types of things students noticed throughout the week (things like gentrification) while working on a community garden with Reinvestment Partners. RP is a multi-pronged organization that advocates for economic justice and empowerment in Durham. Right now, they’re creating a food hub and food corridor along East Geer St., which forms part of a traditionally low-income, majority-minority neighborhood.

It’s no coincidence that Geer St. runs into the cultural district Ingrid Williams, with the weight of a New York Times pronouncement, describes as “surfacing.” If she walked up Geer, toward Reinvestment Partners’ office near N. Roxboro, she might call that segment “neglected.” After all, where are the NYT-approved signs of urban progress—the string-lit beer gardens, the runners’ clubs, the warehouse-chic? During a Durham scavenger hunt last week, we had the Project Change students look for (and interpret) “old things” and “new things,” and how they related to “art spaces,” “places to eat,” and “gathering places,” in Durham. How often they coexisted, how often they overlapped—pseudo-rustic signage, new construction abutting abandoned shops, murals on old buildings with new site plans.

Williams’s article is in the travel section; it’s geared toward tourism; it aims to generate a conversation, for outsiders, around desire, around an assumed familiar metric of “cool” and “good.” I want to go there! But I think about how the NYT article, bound by its genre, fails to mention the ~$50mil luxury condo and retail development that’s begun to displace the historic Liberty Warehouse at the corner of Rigsbee and W. Corporation. As Sorg points out in the Indy piece, many locals—all of whom presumably hold the right to access Durham’s cultural center—won’t be able to afford living there. I can’t afford living there. I think of a recent CityLab article about how high-rise apartment dwellers typically feel safe and “cozy” in their respective fortresses, but unsafe in the surrounding neighborhoods. I drive around downtown Durham and see umpteen simultaneous apartment developments. All seem to have a suspiciously similar drab aesthetic, far from Durham’s historic architectural styles; sore thumbs in their respective neighborhoods. I wonder if these new residents will converse with neighbors beyond their building.

Between articles about Ferguson and Durham, and between eight days of Project Change, I’m thinking a lot about framing conversation. Which voices, and which stories, cast the net and create the frame? Is said frame equitable? Who gets easy access? Who doesn’t? How can conversation be framed in unique and unexpected ways, and how does this framing influence “the information” itself? I like to think that the pairing of these two articles about Durham—one from a major national newspaper, one from a local alt-weekly—casts a wide net for several conversations that need to happen. The thematic content and tone of each piece speak to the mere existence of a conversational spectrum. I’ve been similarly inspired following Marcia Chatelain’s #FergusonSyllabus project—a means to expand the net by crowdsourcing articles and resources, both for students and the general public, related to the events in Ferguson. It provides tangible products, but also says, more broadly, this is complicated; let’s err on the side of conversation, and move with it in turn.

—MD

Empty Moves, or being alienated together

By Michaela Dwyer

Last Friday, in the heart of downtown Durham, I watched a small French man receive a lifetime achievement award in dance. Following three different laudatory introductions, he, short and nimble, crept out from behind the red stage curtain as if part of a magician’s reveal. He accepted the award humbly, speaking in heavily accented English of the dancers and choreographers who had previously won the award—among them Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones—as his “heroes.” He then disappeared offstage and the performance began: two straight hours of rigorous choreography executed by four dancers—two women, two men—set to a John Cage vocal score recorded live in Milan in 1977.




Parched of particulars, this description might be alienating. The choreographers I listed above may be foreign names; hearing the name “Angelin Preljocaj,” this year’s Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award winner, may cap off the unfamiliarity. Sitting in one place for two hours anywhere—whether mandatory or not—is likely an undesirable activity. If mandatory, then even more so. But sometimes I feel as though the messaging around art implies that it’s a voluntary contract. On one level, we can always opt to leave a museum or performance. On another, we can divert funding elsewhere, categorize the arts as superfluous, relegate them to the nebulous realm of the “emotional” and “beautiful,” remove them from public education, bypass the nominating procedures for a state’s poet laureate.

The Cage score to which Ballet Preljocaj’s three-part Empty Moves is set features Cage reading parts of Henry David Thoreau’s journals. Though “read” gives the impression that what Cage performs sounds straightforward and tame, i.e., “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” punctuated by tasteful pauses. Not exactly. Cage pedals on for two hours, speaking in phonemes—the “smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.” Mostly the recording sounds like a drone. And then it sounds like this: the crowd in Milan thinks Cage is done, begins applauding, gets angry when Cage drones on. The remainder of the recording could pass for a political riot in its barrage of hostile sounds: jeers, chants, screams, sirens, and objects hitting something—or someone—with force. But all throughout, calm and steady, are Cage’s phonemes. And, all throughout, the four dancers dance—unflagging, seemingly incognizant of the audiences. I use the plural because, really, there are two: the audience bristling in Milan in 1977, and the audience that paid to see them sweat in Durham in 2014, which includes me.

I didn’t originally intend to write a piece about dance. I fear the alienation effect in my writing in the same way that I fear bringing someone largely unfamiliar with capital-“D” Dance to a show like the one I describe above. I fear the lack of connection afterward, the fumbling for words; I fear becoming self-satisfied and closed-off in my knowledge of the field. But I also fear alienating myself from engaging in material that does something to me. I thank my dance training for linking my appreciation and engagement with art with the physical. I know art does something when my body moves in response; when I sprout goosebumps; when I pitch forward in my seat; when I squeeze the hand of the person sitting next to me.

The day after Preljocaj’s show, I had a Twitter conversation about it with a post-doc and an arts administrator at a local university. We’d never met, but we talked as if we had—or at least with the ease and eagerness that come from having a shared experience. I told him I liked thinking about the way Cage’s score manipulated both audiences; he wondered why the Durham audience didn’t respond in the way the Milan one did. In other words, why no riot?

I’d wondered the same thing, having seen only a few walk out during the performance. I treasure these little disruptions. I look around eagerly to see if other people notice them. The leaving feels to me like another physical response to art: a more overtly social one, one that breaks my solitary understanding of a performance (read: me, watching dancers onstage) and forces it into a wider network (the heavy-breathing woman behind me; the man who walks out briskly). This feels like a stepping-stone to community, to a, Hey, look at that person who’s had enough! In fact, look at us existing in this space together! We’ve been here for an hour-and-a-half and these dancers show no signs of stopping! What if we never leave?

But what would I have done had I been at Kara Walker’s exhibit when Nicholas Powers started yelling? Would I have felt similarly compelled to yell? Would I have felt safe? Would I use the word “treasure” in an essay later to categorize Powers’s disruption? Would I have perceived it as “disruption” in the first place?

We respond to challenging things—art only one among them—on the spectrum of politeness. Maybe there’s Point A: bristling at two hours of dance (or John Cage) but glazing over the discomfort, and then Point B: yelling, and then writing a piece about it, and keeping the conversation going. Which response to alienation is more productive? And for whom?

I think it circles back to us. We who do the making—and the defending—whether we’re artists, politicians, students, activists, pre-orientation program leaders. In the material we produce and share, we can huddle around the didactic or the to-be-determined. Point A and Point B. We help hold the space, and the bristling, in between—the space where maybe, hopefully, we’re bristling together.