“While “surveillance” might conjure images of security cameras, cellphones and other machines, What Remains considers less concrete, more culturally ingrained kinds of surveillance that shape and have shaped the black American experience.”

— New York Times

Boston-born choreographer Will Rawls returns to the ICA with poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine with What Remains, a collaborative performance that responds to questions of presence by poetically addressing the erasure and exposure that drives the historical disturbance of black citizens.

Through movement and language, What Remains invites us across the threshold of a historical void, creating an immersive environment from the idea of an entombed imagination, and responding to violence and disappearance with a resonant, ghostly chorus.

Created in collaboration with and performed by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis.

“That’s one thing about being black in America, you have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life. So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night? Can I hold Skittles in my hand? Can I have my cell phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”

—Claudia Rankine

“Black bodies have always been under surveillance in this country—the form of police control, video surveillance, or racist legal policy that has the tireless capacity to reinvent itself from era to era. What Remains experiments with the possibility of a performance as a place of discovery and self-determination while addressing these kinds of forces.”

—Will Rawls

Artist bios

What Remains was commissioned, developed, and premiered by Live Arts Bard, the commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. What Remains was developed with additional commissioning support from the French Institute Alliance Française’s (FIAF) Crossing the Line Festival, the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University, Yale Repertory Theater, and Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston.

What Remains is a Summer Stages Dance @ the ICA/Boston project and is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, David Parker, The Aliad Fund, George and Ann Colony, and Stephanie and Leander McCormick-Goodhart. Additional support for Will Rawls’s residency came from the American Repertory Theater.

Support for the ICA’s 2018–19 Performance Season is provided by Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Ellen Poss, and The Boston Foundation.

Access for Boston’s dance community is supported in part by the Pratt-Hall Fund.