Blank Map, created and performed by a temporary collective of queer African-American performance artists (Adee Roberson, Brontez Purnell, keyon gaskin, Tasha Ceyan, and Wizard Apprentice) and produced under the aegis of the dancer, choreographer, and provocateur Keith Hennessy, apparently had a fraught birth.
Somewhere along the way, Hennessy and his collaborators found themselves at political and aesthetic odds over Hennessy’s right to create a work about African-American queer culture (he was born in Canada and is white), his ability to garner large and prestigious grants, and a sense that they were losing hold of their own story.
So you might ask, what do you get when a project falls apart and then falls back together again? Well, I don’t know the general answer or rule, but in the case of Blank Map (which is presented as part of the National Queer Arts Festival) you get one trippy piece of performance art that is blessedly free of the need to please or make concessions.
At first it simply feels like a mood piece — loopy psychedelic music, dancing that doesn’t quite get going — and you wonder if it might continue in this way for the entirety of its 50-minute length. But after a while, things start to happen: Purnell throws some hand shadows upstage on a deep blue screen, lies on the ground, pulls his pants down, and throws some butt shadows; Roberson starts to play the drums.
But there’s no big, dramatic payoff: gaskin just leaves the stage, not dramatically, but pleasantly, like he’s just had enough of all this. This marks the first of many moments where the collective simply resists the inclination to perform in the ways that we’re used to.