India Harville, a Black woman with long locs, wearing a beautiful white dress and a translucent white veil adorned with delicate and elegant embroidery. On the wooden floor, there are lit white candles. She has a peaceful and tranquil expression.

Liminal

Liminal is a body of work exploring psychological, physiological, and spiritual thresholds as spaces, or states one is not simply meant to pass through, but exist within; A practice of finding respite and agency in all the in betweens.

Funded by

Collaborators

Kayla Hamilton
JJ Omelagah
Ifasina Clear
Tammy Johnson

YEARS

2023-2025

BACKGROUND

A somatic biomythography of sorts, Liminal will include a written book, a pedagogical framework, and a live multimedia dance performance/ritual - Inviting people into a space of liberatory and subversive porousness in a world that uses rigid and static definitions as a mechanism of suppression and control.

As a spiritual healer, Disability Justice consultant, dance artist, and embodied human, I’m sometimes called to, and often expected to function as a bridge between worlds/contexts which might otherwise not meet: Between Black Disabled creatives and Eurocentric cultural institutions/foundations; Between folx in this realm and their ancestors which have passed; Between people who crawl, walk and use wheelchairs as someone who at different points moves through all these vantage points.

This mental agility is often illegible—in a result-obsessed world, a bridge is rendered useless once you’ve reached your destination. But being a bridge, especially in a time where the old world orders are collapsing but the future remains existentially unknown—is the work cut out for us all.

Approach

In Liminal, the performance, I will invite the audience to join me in an imperfect circle consisting of chairs for bodies of different sizes, spaces for wheelchairs, beds for those who need them, and mats for those who’d rather stay close to the ground. I will introduce consent-based participatory rituals, framing the evening as a performance where we can stop performing—a body, an identity or an idea that remains fixed/unchanged. I will then present a multimedia dance in the round, which will include movement, video and spoken/recorded text—unpacking some of these themes across the different identities, embodiments, and heritages between which I exist. 

India Harville wearing a white dress, dancing and moving gracefully through a bright space. This is shot 1 of a series of four dynamic and expressive shots conveying a sense of joy and harmony.
India Harville wearing a white dress, dancing and moving gracefully through a bright space. This is shot 2 of a series of four dynamic and expressive shots conveying a sense of joy and harmony.
India Harville wearing a white dress, dancing and moving gracefully through a bright space. This is shot 3 of a series of four dynamic and expressive shots conveying a sense of joy and harmony.
India Harville wearing a white dress, dancing and moving gracefully through a bright space. This is shot 4 of a series of four dynamic and expressive shots conveying a sense of joy and harmony.

A PERSONAL NOTE

India Harville, a Black woman, is seen from behind, her face reflected in a handheld vanity mirror. She is standing in front of a window and seen smiling in the mirror's reflection.

Liminal feels like the reclamation of my artist self, after years where my work as a consultant has taken center stage, ironically to build tangible systems of support which will enable other Black Disabled artists to create. While working to ensure the material conditions that allow accessible art to be made/witnessed is always central to my work, Liminal is my return to the immaterial spaces which allow my spirit to imagine beyond the externally imposed limitations that my existence inherently defies. 

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