Benji Hart's World After This One Finds Meaning Through Oppositional Forces

MacDowell Fellow in interdisciplinary arts Benji Hart (20) premiered World After This One, a work using movement and spoken word performance, in March of 2024 on consecutive weekends at three Chicago venues — Steppenwolf Theatre, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Chicago. The work, Hart explains, examines “how Black people have historically reclaimed the materials of empire to construct portals to impossible futures,” and they spent their month-long residency in MacDowell’s Nef Studio working out much of the staging and choreography of the solo performance.

Born of the tension that exists not only in all great art, but political movements as well, the performance piece blurs the lines between the secular and sacred and celebration and mourning, looking through the lenses of the queer street style of vogue, the Afro-Boricua dance and drumming tradition of bomba, and gospel music.

The artist spoke about the oppositional forces in the work with writer and curator Tara Aisha Willis for Sixty Inches from Center: "Black art forms reject black and white hard lines: Is this oppressive or liberatory? Is this a rejection of these systems or an aspiration to them?” Benji asks. “Often there isn’t a clear one-way-or-the-other answer. It was very uncomfortable for me to sit with the lack of clarity and at the same time recognizing it was the tension between all those things, the tension between those contradictions, that literally created these art forms. And seeing tension and contradiction as generative, both challenges some of the assumptions I make or that we make as organizers.”

Learn more about World After This One at benjihart.com/performances and find the Sixty Inches from Center interview here. Esta entrevista está disponible tanto en inglés como en español.

Read about other new works supported by MacDowell Fellowships.

Search for the #MadeAtMacDowell tag on social media to see a history of MacDowell-supported works.

Take a look at the slideshow below for images of Benji performing the work.