Luxurious Performance and the Stakes of Black Excess

Abstract This chapter evaluates the artists who take up the questions about identity in particularly unapologetic ways, ways that illuminate a “luxury” not often afforded Black people. They take up performance spaces in ways that indicate a profound shift in the relationship between Blackness and artistry. From the impetus to assert different sets of values to frame Black culture and imagine the future, the chapter then proposes a re-examination of the concept of luxury in Black dance and for Black performance theory. In conversation with recent meditations on race, affect, ontology, and aesthetics like Black joy, quiet, tenderness, magic, beauty, stillness, struggle, fugitivity, and fabulation, it unpacks the uses and abuses of twenty-first-century performative Black luxury that call to question the life and death stakes of performance in new and important ways. By analyzing the work of artists like nora chipaumire, Orlando Hunter, and Ricarrdo Valentine, the chapter looks at the spectrum of utility as they navigate the terrains of phenomenological luxury. Through their artistry, they weave profound encounters with the humanist pursuits of identity and meaning.