On J U P I T E R

And during the
Covid-19 shutdown,
where could we go?
Why not Jupiter?
the one that comes
after all the asteroids—
the one swirling cold
with ammonia and water—
The biggest one
with the bloody eye  . . .
Why not this place
to mobilize alienation?
to revel in black feminist interiority?
to practice like Petra Kuppers
some starship somatics?
Alone in my studio, I took flight . . .

Jupiter premiered online on April 3, 2021 as a commission for the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival, curated by Kristina Lenzi and Paul Reynolds. It was a solo performance work, with a strong emphasis on solo. Created inside my Los Angeles art studio, it took place under strict COVID-19 protocols. I did the set design, lighting, camera operation, set load-in and strike all by myself along with writing, directing, and performing. (I was so committed to this show that I postponed my second vaccine shot, originally scheduled for the day before.) The festival was transmitted on Vimeo Broadcast, an unfamiliar platform to me, which unlike Zoom had no capacity for users to see or hear the audience directly. As a performer, this emphasized my sense of loneliness and the feeling of making a time capsule or livestream video rather than doing a live performance online.

Still, that disconnect fed the work. In Jupiter, I really did feel like an astronaut beaming out into space, depending only on faith and technology to carry my words to other life elsewhere. This actually matched my experience as an unpartnered black feminist performance artist during the pandemic, living alone far from family in a city I didn’t really know. Kristina, Paul, and I did manage a workaround for the show. Before coming on, I gave them two questions to ask the audience who could email them answers which they could beam to me on my screen at the right moment. (They basically served as mission control.) Other than communicating with Kristina and Paul a few minutes onscreen before and after my performance, the entire experience of Jupiter was a deep immersion into astral realms of my inner self. (Vimeo Broadcast also had a strange lag where if you looked onscreen, you would see your own actions from a few seconds before, a startling déjà vu.) It was by far the strangest performance experience of my life. Click—you’re on! Click, it’s over—but wait you’re still right where you’ve been. But are you? Are you really alone in the universe?

Drawing on trance, bibliomancy, movement, and storytelling, Jupiter became a thrilling black feminist somatic ritual. It felt delicious to explore the inner and outer contours of my body, to pass through boundaries of time and space, to mark new terrain of my own interiority, to defy and surrender to alienation. This work drew inspiration from my participation in Petra Kuppers’ virtual MELT workshop “Home Launch” (January 2021) and was affirmed by my participation in her next virtual MELT workshop “Starship Somatics” (July 2021) where I led a session on “Astral Soundings.” Google Languages reminds us that the word astral relates not just to the stars but also to “a supposed nonphysical realm of existence to which various psychic and paranormal phenomena are ascribed, and in which the physical human body is said to have a counterpart.” Can you think of a better way to describe Zoom or Vimeo Broadcast? Online performance itself? Or for that matter, the archive?

In Jupiter, my spaceship architecture came from activating personal archives and revisiting historical encounters. In the first year of the pandemic, I met online monthly with fellow artists and cultural organizers in a Diaspora Project group led by the inimitable performance visionary Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. At one session, Omi asked us to list all the African nations we knew. (Pause reading this, and try this exercise. What do you notice? Okay, now come back.) I loved the patterns of diaspora knowledge and shadow that emerged. When I shared this exercise with my friend, the writer Jess Arndt, they sent me a link to this incredible, public domain image from Wikipedia of Queen Joumbe-Soudi (aka Djoumbé Soudi, Queen Jumbe-Souli or Queen of Mohéli), taken by French photographer Désiré Charnay (1828–1915). (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7633073)

So many things captivated me about this image. How beautiful everyone is, how carefully the fabrics are gathered around their bodies, swaddling their skin, and especially how protected we find the Queen. What do we know of her interiority? What do we know of our own? And what on earth did she make of the otherworldly encounter with the French men who arrived? (The skinless men can’t really see the Queen of Comoros. Which one is from outer space?)

So far, I have performed Jupiter twice more: once on Zoom for the Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, beaming it from the bedroom of the gracious dancer Alice Gosti with an IRL after-session of bibliomancy in a local park; then, a truncated version in my childhood bedroom as part of the Belladonna* Close Distances online series, curated by Zoe Tuck and Anna Gurton-Wachter (Dec. 2021). (You can find that entire awesome evening with myself, Laura Henriksen, and Zefyr Lisowski on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQdWa-hv7w8. Belladonna* also has published the performance text of Jupiter in its chaplet series, available here: https://www.belladonnaseries.org/chaplets/p/275-gabrielle-civil-jupiter).

The bedroom performance in Detroit brought the work full circle as I likely composed the opening poem ”Mercury is the hottest/ Venus has the clouds” right in that bedroom when I was in fourth grade. As I told my fellow poets before our Zoom set began, my parents brought me back from the hospital after I was born right to that room. I don’t remember that day but the room certainly does. So it was fitting for me to time travel to Jupiter, with my childhood poem and family photographs that I rescued from a shred pile, with all that I know and don’t know of Queen Jumbe- Soudi, of performance, my body, inner and outer space. It is also fitting for this work to appear in the Michigan Quarterly Review, a publication where I interned decades ago as a U of M undergrad under former MQR editor-in-chief (and my poetry professor) Laurence Goldstein. Many thanks to Petra Kuppers & Vidhu Aggarwal for inviting me to share this work.

This all has become a tuning, a sounding, a black feminist SomaFlight.