Marguerite Hemmings in Conversation with Jonathan González
Marguerite Hemmings and longtime collaborator Jonathan González came together to take a deep dive into Marguerite’s upcoming work, Make Ready Again. Read on to hear more about the origins of the work, Marguerite’s artistic practice, and the themes awakening in their work.
Jonathan observes Marguerite in rehearsal for Make Ready Again. Photo by Angel Edwards.
Jonathan González
Can you speak to the title of the work, Make Ready Again? How did the choice come about, and how does this title relate to what the audience will experience?
Marguerite Hemmings
“Make Ready Again” comes from the etymological meaning of reparations. I came upon that meaning about seven years ago, when Jack Theater in Brooklyn had a series dedicated to research and study around reparations called reparations 365. They invited me as an embodied artist to speak to this topic from another perspective. And mind you, this is 2017, after Ta-Nehisi Coates comes out with that essay The Case for Reparations, so reparations is this buzzword at that time saturating liberal media.
Marguerite in performance at Jack Theater 2017
I thought about how I could engage in a choreographic practice around such a traumatic subject— and I saw the phrase “make ready again” as an entry point. Repair is a ritual. It's something you keep coming back to, to make ready again—it makes me think of everyday mundane sort of care and love. I think of waking up every day and making your bed, or kissing your partner, or watering the plants.
I wanted to face the reality: there is no relationship between us and the state—no loving relationship between us at the state. So, how can I not center the state in this question around care and repair—even though it's technically their bill to pay, they're not paying.
The last two iterations of [Make Ready Again] were all group practice, which felt so right. And this time, it's like it's a solo but I have a whole group of musicians working with me. I have a bunch of friends I'm calling into the process. I'm not alone, but I am centering a sort of more personal practice or story around my own ideas of making ready again making myself ready again or like caring, caring for myself— I'm getting deeper into the question of like, okay, as the state becomes both more absent, neglectful, and totalitarian— how can I maybe take that as a call to go inward and look more internally to see what do I really need? How can that orient me towards the spaces and people that I do need if I'm trying to practice this care? What are the right spaces to do that?
Jonathan González
It feels like we're getting into process and practice– speaking about 2017, on the heels of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement , three years earlier than that reparations creates a really pivotal moment in the journalistic ecology. You think we're past the colonial, and we're starting to realize the colonial is still very present in our lives with the kind of uprisings that happened in Ferguson. You're getting us to think through the important work that art allows us to think through. Your particular work gets us to think through: How does practice, our personal practices, our collective practices, have material weight in the world?
You make mention of shadow work. Can you start by talking about the shadow, and shadow work, as a personal practice and also a choreographic practice?
Marguerite Hemmings
Marguerite’s silhouette in rehearsal. Photo by Angel Edwards.
I love that you already framed this as: let's know that our practices, our creative practices specifically speak to material realities – let's just know that from the base! When it comes to shadow work, it's taken me a while to really see that it is also material work, that's matter, like the shadow is real! It's not not real, similar to our dead, like they're not not real, they're the things that we don't see that matter. In my intimate life, I’ve been engaging intentionally in shadow work, which for me, is facing parts of my psyche that are neglected— parts of my ancestry, or my energetic body that are neglected or unseen, or at the margin of my awareness– wanting to simply just be aware or be in more conscious relationship with those parts. When I say going inward for shadow work it still means that it's a relational practice because this shadow work is about meeting the multiple parts of an ecosystem, which is me, but it's also all of this [gesturing broadly].For me, shadow work has to be done, in reflection of others.
I spent a couple of years working [in] intimate pairings with close friends, where we're naming that we're doing shadow work together– speaking and reflecting to each other, these parts that we don't ever talk about. That we hide. We make it real, we make those parts real to each other. And a lot of that, for me, comes through unconscious movement. This speaks to practices in this work, where I've let my brain, or at least my frontal cortex, move out the way when I'm moving, or dancing, and allow for more of the unconscious to take the lead.
Being in movement practice where I'm intentionally turning off the dominant culture in my brain, just making space, and then being witnessed in that is really important– these art forms that sort of tap into just other parts of our brain.
Marguerite’s hands reviewing notes on a series of white index cards. Photo by Angel Edwards.
Writing has been really, really, really, really big, where similar to the movement practice, I'll write automatically. I'm just gonna write, however, whatever's coming out. And then I'll use that as material. And for me, the writing practice, the movement practice, and then also, this dreaming practice , where I'll also wake up from a dream, write that down, and let that hold weight.
I’m like, ’okay now, this is the thing now’. This dream is what I'm working with. This is the material. States of being like sleeping, movement, or dancing, for me can be an unconscious state. Also music!
The act of hearing music, but also making music is another practice of working the shadow. That’s been really big in this iteration of it, where I've been taking songs that have been on repeat in my subconscious, that I just can't get out of my head. And I'll work with them, I'll chop them, I'll screw them, I'll stretch them out.
It's really making these, making these compulsive parts of my world, come forward. Like, let's work this thing. So it feels like this iteration is really me performing these practices, and being witnessed by. It really is a performance of shadow work, or my approach to shadow work.
Jonathan González
What's really special is this choreographic practice, this sonic practice, this journal practice, this collective collaborative practice, is calling upon you to name these kinds of subconscious, lower conscious desires. In this creative process for Make Ready Again, it sounds like you've relied on turning off the part of us that typically prepares us, building a practice where you trust impulse, you trust improvisation. You trust the desires that linger, and have maybe a real logic behind them, but they're present in these kinds of subconscious terrains of our mind, and you've made psychic space for them in the studio.
For the context of this work, I think it’s an interesting rub that you're making ready again by moving away from how we traditionally would think about readying ourselves–turning back to intuition, turning back to kinds of unreadable desires that we have.
And it sounds like you being with other people, learning how to extend grace to one another to be in more holistic ways for each other creatively, rather than this kind of prefrontal cortex performed self.
So, why shadow work? And what are you trying to do for yourself in terms of your contribution as an artist?
Marguerite Hemmings
Thank you for that question.
Jonathan González
Yeah. Why now? And also why in your role as an artist, have you been thinking through this?
What are the reasons, the urgencies, the drivers that are pushing you to try to work in this way with other people?
Marguerite Hemmings
I've felt seduced by the demand on Black performance to be always ready to be seen, consumed. Be the head of culture making, to be so at a pace of constant laboring around being so visible. From about 2014-17, I was making work very much naming Blackness and African diaspora and freedom, and the ways that the work was just consumed by mostly non-Black audiences and the ways I felt in those spaces. I felt like I was just missing the point — I felt only the prefrontal cortex. I felt like all of this sort of weight with me was suddenly just not activated. My practice with Black performance from the age of zero has always had that weight and that unconsciousness, so to be in these concert dance settings or commercialized settings, it was clear that I could not be in these spaces without a balancing practice.
I need to do shadow work. I need to name and be in the parts that aren't allowed or that aren't seeable in these spaces. I need to see those. I need to at all times be aware of what's all with me.
I'm able to just say that now but that came up initially through breakdowns, breakups, emotional turmoil — my shadow banging at my door. It’s like an old friend coming to say, let's sit with each other again. It became a spiritual life saving practice that I needed– I'm making it sound so conscious. But it feels like I was literally like, gripped up, like, okay you're in the shadow now. It didn't feel like a choice. It felt like: if you want to continue as a performer this is what you need to do.
It is a form of homeostasis. How do I balance out this constant demand to be on, which I can't escape from?
And yeah, the practices came through the breakdown.
Jonathan González
As they ought to do, right? I think the breakdown sounds like entropy. This system we're working through is a system. And maybe that system runs on your labor and your creativity, and then there's a breakdown in that machine.
And then you have to do the mechanics to get the machine running again, or you have to find a new method of working. A new engineering, a new kind of, a new kind of nuts and bolts to the working practice. So I wonder: what is this performance for you?
So coming back to this work, I wonder: what is this performance for you? What is this working it out in the work? Is it a repair?
Is it kind of breaking down? Is it permitting yourself to do some kind of breakdown of the psychic spaces of being on, being very visible and letting the shadow have space? Can you talk a little bit about where these big questions of repair come in?
Marguerite Hemmings
Doing this work feels like a relationship with a loved one that has been neglected. This is me coming out with my shadow.
I’m no longer acting like this part of me doesn't exist. I perform this breakdown to give context to why this ceremony needs to even happen. I memorized a script for the first half to give myself something to slip in and out of, just like how these dominant narratives that I've memorized start to break down because they're not of me. I play the breakdown, I play the entropy.
I’m trying to keep these narratives going, but then we see that we can't. It's letting these breaks and fissures allow space for the shadow to be seen and be there.
It's not until the second half of the work that I'm no longer thinking. This is the change in my practice. I’m no longer trying to fit into these narratives and memorize them till I can recite them perfectly. I'm just trying to vibe at the end of the day.
It's more of like a state of being that exists outside of this paradigm of brokenness and fixed, or wrong and right. It's about sitting with the allness of it, which I get to by the second half.
Jonathan González
There is this relinquishing of the kind of perfectionist directorial pursuit of being on and all associations that have to do with that preparedness that is conventional to theater and dance. History is a race and performance. And you're rupturing that for us, definitely.
You're inviting failure. You're inviting us to see you think aloud. You're, at least in the first half, as you said, you're going through the process of unfolding in front of us in many ways.
And it's not clean. It's not about, a kind of overlapping, easy collage of ideas. There's gaps and there's silences and there's breaks.
What is the infrastructure that we need to meet this moment, to meet the needs and the relations and connections with ourselves and each other? If we can break ourselves out of certain ideas around our preparedness and how we present ourselves through our imaginal space, maybe we can imagine other ways of creativity, other inroads and new outways of this paradigm that we're trapped inside of. If we're inviting failure, if we're inviting lapses and silences, maybe we'll listen to the thing that has been denied.
Can you talk about the conversation that you're having with the field of art making, with the infrastructure of art making, especially at this government moment? How are you conceiving about the things for yourself that are nourishing in order to keep you in this practice at this moment?
Marguerite Hemmings
There's a tenderizing call, I'll say, and I'm embracing that call for myself. I would love to see just more creative spaces that are really about this tenderizing. I'm sitting with softening in and away from the call to perform. For these totalitarianist regimes, the shadows in folklore, especially African diasporic folklore, call for rebellion. It's clear that we don't just need creative practices towards performance, but also towards rebellion — what are other ways rebellion can look like?
The shadow and the spider are another big guide for this piece. What are these archetypes and figures that are ancient, indigenous, present, future, that are just here?
“if we’re inviting failure, if we’re inviting lapses and silences, maybe we’ll listen to the thing that has been denied.”
I think the dance field, especially for Black dancers, we've been needing a sort of reckoning, rebellion, where we're just not beholden to any of these entertainment systems as they've been — I imagine a world where that is so obsolete.
Jonathan González
You're exemplifying the idea of moving away from these ideas of readability. You're playing with opacity by using darkness and light. You're playing with the shadow, which itself is about this kind of interior that we can't access.
You're getting us to go to those places that are not traditionally centered as the communication, as the primary performer. You also have a robust sound space for us, which maybe you can talk about those collaborations that you've made, and you can talk about liveness in terms of live musicians and live sound, and how that is another one of the cool aspects that is getting us to that undersoil, getting us to that underneath, right?
Marguerite Hemmings
Musicians in rehearsal for Make Ready Again at Boom Room Studios. From left to right: Lee Clarke, TrumpetWom, Lenny Mobley, and Daniel Woods.
We have seven live musicians, three from the collective Omar's Hat, and four individual musicians. They know these techniques of the shadow — they know how to hold space for ceremony around speaking to the inner part — to making loud what we don't see. We're working through sonically and also breaking apart the song, No, No, No, You Don't Love Me by Dawn Penn.
We’re taking this song that holds so much diasporic weight, melodically, lyrically, that's sort of recognizable to a lot of folks in diaspora — and we're sitting in that, and playing with it. And that song, because it comes from so many blues iterations, feels like a shadow song — at least it’ll speak for my shadow.
It's like — you don't love me. It's the neglect of you don't love me anymore. It's sitting with that. It's grief, but also acceptance. It’s been an anchor, sonically, to give the shadow its weight in that moment of bluesing.
We also have a completely open improv prompted by a few different things — the sounds that you hear when you're watching children's stories, these sounds that help to get us into a space of wonder. There's something about wonder, where we don't know what's happening — and how to recover that wonder, or to uncover the wonder, and the curiosity. The musicians play into that, and we're at their disposal at that point. And yeah, it's great. It's my favorite. I love live music — I love good musicians.
Jonathan González
And it feels really apropos to the ethic of the work that we finish, really, with sound having a strong presence, that we've moved away from the visual. Audiences will see things projected, and they'll learn through reading, but also being kind of bathed in sound, this material, and being an unseen force that taps into our memory spaces. Sound has the capacity to send us back to scenes of our life without us having control over it.
Is there anything else you want people to know?
Marguerite Hemmings
Come — come as you are.
Jonathan González is an artist and choreographer who makes durational performance, dance, sound, prose, poetry and video. His latest performance, Spectral Dances, premiered at the American Academy of Arts and Letters throughout the month of October investigating practices of Black non-performance, architectural histories, and infrared sound. His first book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, will be published in 2025 by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is a Herb Alpert Awardee (2024), and has been generously supported by the MAP Fund and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. https://gonzalezinfo.com/
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
