A site-responsive performance, pushit!! is a meditation on emotional labor and the impossibility of the “stage” as a place of freedom for the Black performer. The work is choreographed and/or sculpted around the social/political landscapes of the city/space/present-ing body and the unique architecture of the building/private space.

This work is the first in a series of the exercises in getting well soon, a project/meditation based on the loose and often used phrase indicating a hope of recovery. The exercises in getting well soon have been articulated as movement, installation, theater, games, endurance and collective action. If “Hope is a Discipline” as the activist Mariame Kaba writes, what are the methods of hope in a performance practice? Or does hope have to be abandoned in order to get well, as Calvin Warren proposes in his essay “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”?