Rafi Darrow

Artist Statement

I’m an antidisciplinary artist working on Ohlone land in so-called Oakland, California. Raised on Haudenosaunee land, (in Buffalo, NY) my art is rooted in the pervasive illness and loss that’s shaped my hometown, and the ways this troubles the boundaries of the human body and unsure contours of our global futures. My work lives in the liminality this precarity creates, and the inter-marginalized care and intimacy it necessitates.

I’ve studied with integrated dance company Stopgap on a Fulbright scholarship, and presented at the Society for Disability Studies. I’ve facilitated workshops at Dartmouth College and SAFEhouse for the Arts, and also studied with the Dancing Disability Lab, created diversely accessible film with InterdepenDance, and undertook a distinguished fellowship at Hambidge Arts. Additionally, I performed in the accessible nightlife pop up, Crip Ecstasy, and published a piece in the journal Feral Feminisms on trans, disabled, femme excess. Most recently I was awarded a Movement Research residency through the Mellon Foundation, and completed a fellowship with the Critical Design Lab. I will soon perform my dance and poetry with my collaborators, Charle Wallace and Elle Hong, at the historic Judson Church.

Alive in the animacy of autistic relationality, Wiley, my beloved wheelchair, holds me in our dance. I move in the certainty of the vibrant inner lives of inanimate objects, dancing through the neurodivergent experience that shapes my world; the hyper-empathetic neurotype that makes the objects around me bright with emotion and movement. As an autistic, I feel the liveness of the inanimate things around me, the porosity of my body; a thing constantly felt, the embodied reality of my complicated grief through disability progression. As Mel Chen details in “Toxic Animacies,” there are neurotypes that, by toxic injury and/or developmental disability (of which I live both), experience their bodies as unsteadily bounded and deeply connected to (even indistinguishable from) the beings, inanimate or not, that they come in contact with. Especially in grief/loss these inanimate objects become animate; company, stimulus. I reach for my chair and it reaches back, viscerally, and that partnership, that (deeply multiply disabled) autistic pas de deux is something intimate and invigorating that Im excited to explore; a manifestation of developmentally disabled phenomenology. This phenomenological perspective links critical disability studies to the visceral making of movement, grounded in the juncture between theory and embodiment.

What does a dance look like where dancer and chair are both seen as partners? Not symbolic of “disabled loss;” but flush with the power of crip gain, as two bodies (Wiley and I) come into intimate partnering, nearly spooning, as I sit. Other art objects, such as the transparent architectural installation I partner with in the video; the heavy clay bowl; (that I use to cleanse in a/the Jewish mourning tradition) sit so surely demarcating negative space, the perfect dance lead. What is that duet of care and how does it look different than any other performance involving a person and wheelchair? What is autistic movement and how do I communicate that particular joy and grief (of inaccess and isolation, loss of freedom and capacity) and interspecies connectivity? I am interested in reframing neurodivergent physicality, which has come to provide an aesthetic shorthand for difference, ugliness and distress in mainstream contemporary dance for abled performers. Getting the chance to embrace stimming and other versions of autistic and cerebral pals-y motion as a thing of joy and soothing, even mundanity, is the dream. I’m interested in using my/other bodies to explore choreographic making that centers the disabled performer, our individual movement vernacular dictating a Cunninghamian “choreography by chance” of sorts-- letting moments of unexpected disabled expression be opportunity and jumping off point rather than mistakes.

How does this all happen, while attending to the disabled audience we desire? How do we hold gently the grief and loss that characterizes disabled becoming, allowing audience to bloom into the generosity of our bones? How do we make performance imagining a disabled spectator as well? I am particularly interested in creative ways of making things sensorily accessible, as a visually impaired and sensory sensitive person myself. How can the theater become a full-sense experience? Can lights be used for heat as well as visual brilliance? Can performers engage in touch with consenting audience members? Can audio description be integrated in a way that feels easeful, thoughtful and detailed, a piece of art in and of itself? I’m interested in exploring dance as a mutually tactile and auditory experience of moving with the grief of disabled loss and joy of crip ritual and rebirth, through the use of props, set, noisy clothing, and voiced description.