The Future Has Always Been Black

Abstract This chapter presents a performance text commissioned by the TanzKongress 2019 event, A Long Lasting Affair, curated by Berlin-based American artist Meg Stuart. The titular provocation, that “The Future Has Always Been Black,” asserts a non-territorialized Blackness, born of the violence of the Middle Passage, which spreads outward from the chaos of any number of bad historical actors including the slavers who gathered African people on the continent for trade. And before that even, when disappointment led to violence in any manner of social relation. The text proposes that the future of human is indeed the future of Black, with dance as a binding agent that encourages vibrancy beyond measure. The six sections of the work each commanded thirty minutes of performance time, resulting in a three-hour event. Across the three hours of performance, each and every Black artist attending the TanzKongress was invited to participate in some section of the work, responding to the text concerned with Anthropocene, Aesthetics, Globalizations, Queer Entanglements, Fearmongering, and Shame.