Sage Ni'Ja
Whitson

Before we approach this dance, we must think a little about ceremony. How do we prepare ourselves for something we can never be prepared for? How do we enter in relation with each other? How do we begin to dance, as Stevie Wonder sings, in square circle?

I have held a question like this close to my heart ever since I first saw two bodies dance down the halls and stairs of Abron Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, where we followed in a second line, finding a fold to unfold ourselves into and through the tight spaces.

Was this a ceremony? It was for me. To find the words brother to brother—words first addressed to me when I was at the cusp of manhood, looking for my comrade; there and then they came untied and conjugated across a new acre of good flesh. Unbinding bodies from the violent relatedness of gender, sparking to a flagrant, fervid touch.

Later, we used selfie sticks and the internet to compose a black parade that struck the fear of god in me. We started in Black Performance Studies and ended in Black Performance Studies.

Whitson has made an enactment of the experiment of unarriving (their word). When and where we enter, all of the race arrives with us. Their constant play with the darkness of blackness within and against the bleak, bright terror of immediacy.

Yonder, I have heard, they do not love this flesh, this flash, this fragrant air of our grounation. And so we turn away and go back into the dark room, come out to play at night, dance again under the lunatic stars, who do not count our names or sorrows.

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Whitson’s visual practice centers on “The Unarrival Experiments,” an ongoing body of work that uses dark matter and dark energy as conceptual portals to interrogate Black and Trans embodiment, premature death, and what they term the “vaporous body.” Working across installation, performance, and extended reality (XR), they create multi-form works that explore relationships between astrophysics, cosmology, and the mysteries of existence through a Black, Queer, and Trans lens. Recent works like “Transtraterrestrial”—described as “a live performance installation designed to amplify the dark”—engage Yorùbá cosmology alongside astrophysics and research on the “blackest black,” creating spaces where scientific inquiry meets spiritual practice. Whitson’s approach, which they call “anti-disciplinarity,” manifests through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual, using science, technology, and visual art to examine the unknown forces that shape both the universe and Black, Trans experience. This research extends into experimental literary form with their forthcoming book Transtraterrestrial: Dark Matter and Black Divinities, to be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025.

Text: Tavia Nyong’o