Ephemeral Organs: Dance Curation, Research, and Performance

As Curator-in-Residence, Theater and Dance, Tara Aisha Willis provides context for the Ephemeral Organ series and discusses her forthcoming book projects and past curatorial work. Ephemeral Organ culminates in April 2025 and brings together residencies, performances, and talks by several artists whose work explores choreography and the body in motion as a technology for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience.

Willis’s body of research explores the lineages and practices of Black experimentation and improvisation in dance through contemporary performances. To do so, she uses dance historical context, frameworks from Black studies and performance theory, and explorations embedded in her creative practices as curator and dancer. In part, her work grapples with the archival capacities of the dancing body and with how movement emerges within the process of generating archival research.

Her scholarly book in development, Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness, points to the intricacy and changeability of both dance and race in performances by choreographers Bebe Miller, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Ralph Lemon, as well as Will Rawls: one for which Willis served as curator and the other in which she performed. A more experimental book project in collaboration with writer Jaime Shearn Coan and artist taisha paggett challenges conventional modes of writing and archiving dance practices across paggett’s body of performance work (forthcoming from Soberscove Press).

Guided by her simultaneous practices as a writer, curator, and dancer, in this talk Willis discusses the structuring devices of her thinking across these various platforms: methods for attending to the specificities of live, movement-driven performance in programming and on the page.

The series begins with residencies and talks in November 2024 with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Steffani Jemison, collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the program culminates in a weekend of events: a performance by Leslie Cuyjet, an installation and performance by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and artist talks by Steffani Jemison and Justine A. Chambers on their latest works which register archival and historical traces through gesture.