Becoming Ground

Essays and Other Texts Aug. 13, 2026

person resting — Jonathan González, Spectral Dances; Photo: Maria Baranova

Seeking to investigate another mode of being with the ground and the proposition of a shared practice of groundedness distinct from the inherited historical, architectural, and choreographic infrastructures of that which has become symbolized as the presence, resonance, purpose, and function of ground—as in the first steps of the projects labeled modernity on fallow land,¹ the insatiable potential for geospatial development and industrialization,² and the development stages for a body to be anatomically organized toward the demands of uprightness³—I want to trouble the proposed omniscience of the upright, rational human as the one who stands over the ground, which always includes the other in its wake. It is an orientation wherein teleologies of progress and their Judeo-Christian ecclesiastical superiority⁴ suspend the upright human over that which they perceive as beneath them, physically and ontologically.

To make trouble of the ninety-degree orientation⁵ and its fixation over the ground and those who are grounded down is to create an oblique call for awareness of the minor epistemologies, cosmologies, frameworks, revolutions, and choreographies that are essential counterprinciples of sustenance animating the day-to-day oblique capacities of more life⁶ on otherwise terms. In this way, that which is lateralized might be deemed self-governable through strategies like standing alongside, or with, or in lineage, or entangled amongst, or in communion with the real and spectral⁷ formations of being in ensemble with, all the while safeguarding itself from the hostile outside and contradictory terrains of our demanded vertical participation.

I hold these utterances from the minor, hesitant⁸ sociogenies⁹ as a kind of insurgent¹⁰ Black sociality in my mind when I review the images of African American and African diasporic workers¹¹ tasked to perform hazardous labor through contingent employment under organizational states of suspension at declining industrial yards with unfettered working conditions and negligible wages. And yet, in these images from national sites across the final periods of deindustrializing cities like Pittsburgh, Gary, and Detroit, there are registers of intimacy in the qualities of these Black workers’ shared touch¹² in moments of mentorship and tutelage captured in their gaze and proximity. I want to think about the kinds of filial, erotic, conscious, and subconscious kinship¹³ that are enabled through Black labor, to which I see dance and performance as a constituent act.¹⁴ In this way, Black intramural performance cannot be captured entirely by the conditions of material ledgers of without-ness and the prevailing systems of surveillance¹⁵ because it is in the performing together that another vantage emerges that does not fit into the narrative formations of liberal progress; something else becomes certain, which I am naming insurgent Black sociality.

The allegorical lesson of this kind of insurgent Black sociality, and the particular kind of Black sociality that demands the participation of the ensemble in task-based performance, always occurs within a contradictory bind of surveillance, illustrating how the longue durée of the body made commodity-form tarries the proletariat impulse of work as being,¹⁶ ushering forth a structural impasse wherein the thriving of the Black life-form¹⁷ demands wholly restructuring the conditions of equitable labor for the proletariat White worker. In other words, Black insurgent sociality demands that the conditions of the party line and the notion of labor be restructured on its grounds, particularly in its most infrastructural claims of personhood as labor-power.

In the archival documents of those Black workers called to break the White union strike¹⁸ lies a necessary story about the role and utility of Black labor as it functions in the origin and entropy of industrial turns that come to mark watershed moments of American modernity. Dance, though readily undertheorized as an extension of industrialized labor, has a similar teleology—for less utilitarian aims, of course, yet highly situated within a libidinal economy of worker oversight, whether it be from the Middle Passage practices of caloric management through the practices of Dancing the Slaves¹⁹ or the current-day practice of quelling civilian unrest in response to police brutality through inner-city programs like line dancing at Karaoke with the Cops.²⁰ Within the framework of Black work and/or Black dance, the ninety-degree orientation continues to haunt these Black performances with an imposition to disarm new horizons for the Black worker. But what kinds of cultural cleavages, interiorities, retentions, and intramural kinships does insurgent Black sociality enact on capital?²¹ How does Black performance as labor restructure the hostile outside with its capacity to reconsider the existential purpose and place of work? How do the choreographies of labor, such as grasping, holding, weight-bearing, and prolonged contact, describe an interstitial Black space of connections that exceeds descriptions of labor-power and object-making?²²

Reaching for the minor field of relations between these quotidian practices of production, and disavowing the predominant orientation that work functions as self-making, these hesitant choreographies on the lateral plane reveal a method of performance where the individual is always more than one,²³ more than an individuated form. In this tentacular terrain, where collective dispersal rather than propertied accrual governs, there is an essential method moving toward more life, toward a dialogue with the regenerative capacities of the ground²⁴ and the kindness of conviviality.²⁵ These attributes are superfluous to industrial capital’s desire for monocropping and monocultural curation.

Through this performative practice, whereby an ensemble performs within the container of a museum, an embodied attempt to be in the stakes of laterality, the group gives attention to low altitudes and to the personal, collective, and site-specific crisis these choreographies usher in, with crisis referring to the Greek origins krisis, for turning point. Attenuating toward the sociolinguistics of laterality and away from the logisticality²⁶ of the vertical demands a neurocognitive dis/reorientation to each other and the surroundings as collaborators, all the while demobilizing the tyranny of the vertical and its biocentric order of carceral rationality.

The choreographic and dramaturgical prompt of this work of becoming ground operates as a noun and a verb, where what is to be done serves as a highly structured improvisational practice for a group of performers to do and feel through the frame of a durational²⁷ performance—an elongated and discrete period—and within the spatial bounds of each other and nineteen steps, a stairwell’s landing, a second-floor vista, and a procession off-stage.²⁸ To travel these variable heights while also being available to the psychological dimensions catalyzed by the tactility of skin to skin, skin to stone, skin to stone to air to sweat, and the internal psychoanalytic scripts of new and reenacted rehearsals of laboring, as in performing, together within the suspended temporality of liveness, and to the availing exposure of museum visitors in this place that is not a stage, but a passageway, a between place for travel—that is the task.

In the frame of the physical materiality and metaphysical life of the ground and the practice of shared grounding in the constant teeter of life and death that is dancing, the surface tension of a variety of multicolored marble stones, witnesses, and fellow performers all become systems of support and feedback, so much so that any shift upward is always also occurring in counterpoint to a field of directions, intentions, and relationalities moving, perhaps quantumly, which is to say arising and decaying, referential to a clinamen,²⁹ in myriad seen and unseen planes, emanating from those very real connections that can only emerge by committing to being close with the ground.

Jonathan González (born 1991, Queens, NY; lives in New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans choreography, sound, image, writing, video, and collective practice. Their artistic research engages themes of memory, Black geographies, and African diasporic temporalities, often through site-specific and durational performance. By combining movement, sound, and image, González creates works that explore embodiment as both a record of history and a rehearsal for the future. González has presented work nationally at major institutions, including Spectral Dances (American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2024), a durational performance and sonic installation, and perejil (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art/The Momentary, 2022), a performance and video work presented in the exhibition Entre/Between. Their writing practice extends their choreographic and visual investigations, and their forthcoming book Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2025. They are the recipient of significant awards, including the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (Dance, 2024), the MAP Fund (2024), and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (Performance Art/Theater, 2019). González’s practice foregrounds hybridity and collaboration, positioning collective action as both an artistic method and a social intervention.

Endnotes

In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx theorized the formation of the proletariat subject-being as actualized by duplicating his subject-status in producing an objective world. As Marx states, “It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.” Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Early Writings, ed. Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Penguin, 1975), 328. In this formulation, the land serves as an object toward the collective principles of production and societal actualization. As I will elaborate later, I want to think through the theoretical language of Black and Indigenous feminisms, particularly through the research of Tiffany Lethabo King, to trouble the fundamental principles of work as an actualizing principle in proletariat doctrinalisms.
In The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture (2022), AbdouMaliq Simone offers a theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. Simone centers the surrounds—those urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention, always threatened by industrialization and geopolitical overreach.
In chapter 3 of Arabella Stanger’s Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance (2021), “Frontier to Skyscraper: Graham, Balanchine, and Land as Acquisition,” Stanger establishes how the conditioning of a dancer toward an upright plumbline during the establishment of American modern dance aligned with turns in modern architecture that sought to devise verticality and height as primary components of this turn.
Sylvia Wynter devises the analytic of Man2 as an evolutionary adaptation of the human fomented through Judeo-Christian ideals wherein the human must take up the image of God, performing and ambitioning in His likeness. Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World (unpublished manuscript, 1970).
In Kemi Adeyemi’s “Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Women/Lean,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019), the ninety-degree is problematized by the performances of leaning representative of subjects at the intersections Blackness, queerness, and gender for whom variable degrees of lowness to the ground and the forty-five degree serve as measures of resistance to uprightness.
Friedrich Nietzsche establishes more life as a principal aim, which is also present in the scholarship of Joshua Chambers-Letson, emphasizing life in its entirety, a way of living toward abundance. Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018).
In October 2024, I produced the durational performance Spectral Dances at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, that placed five performers in relation to a sonic installation of infrared sound and a historic museum in Harlem to consider how to perform with the seen and unseen aspects of sound, architecture, and Black geographies. In this work, spectrality became an essential collaborator as both the good and the bad ghosts that haunt the continuity of the past into our present.
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote Sociology Hesitant in 1905, in the early iterations of the discipline of sociology, to make a plea for hesitancy as a valuable position that social scientists should employ when conducting fieldwork. Du Bois found this hesitant positionality highly informative, especially when studying Black communities.
In the context of Frantz Fanon’s work, particularly in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), sociogeny refers to the social production of phenomena, highlighting how social factors such as racism and colonialism shape individual psychology and identity. It contrasts with biological or ontogenetic explanations, emphasizing that certain psychological traits or behaviors are not inherent but rather are shaped by social structures and experiences.
In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (2023), J. T. Roane studies Black world-making practices, socialities, and spatial politics from the enslavement era in rural Upper South to twentieth-century urban Philadelphia. Roane employs the analytic of insurgency as defined by place-knowing authored by Black citizens.
For more on African American strikebreakers, see Ryan Henderson, “John Hughey and the Legacy of Black Workers at the Carrie Furnaces,” Rivers of Steel, February 18, 2021, https://riversofsteel.com/black-workers-at-carrie/.
Toni Morrison, particularly in her 1987 novel Beloved, explored the complexities of touch and intimacy for formerly enslaved people, highlighting the profound impact of slavery on their physical and emotional selves.
Hortense Spillers organizes an analysis on the history of touch and intimacy in relation to the ongoing lineages of forced kinships in the establishment of America’s founding family, the Hemmings, in her lecture “To the Bone: Speculations on the Problem of Touch,” November 15, 2018, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM3EGoowAJk.
Both Jasmine Johnson in “Black Laws of Dance,” Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies (2020), and Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) locate a history of forced dancing during plantocracy through the testimony of the enslaved women Lu Lee.
In “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social and Cultural Geography 12 (2011), Katherine McKittrick requests that researchers practice narrativizing Blackness descriptively and not as bound to a necropolitical thesis of death. In this proposition, McKittrick emphasizes that we learn what Black sociality does on its own terms, separate from surveillance.
In her 2020 lecture “Beyond Work: Black and Indigenous Feminist Critiques of Work-as-Being,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txP22LhUcgQ, Tiffany Lethabo King parses Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in juxtaposition to Black and Indigenous feminisms to consider how labor does not suffice in these arenas of feminist self-making, which always communes with the earth and animal life as collaborators.
In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson rewrites the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, establishing the Black life-form as a species formation for Black being in the realm of animalia.
Documentary films of reference include David Loeb Weiss, No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968) and Raymond Henderson and Tony Buba, Struggles in Steel (1996).
See Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007) on the historic practice of what has been called “Dancing the Slaves.”
See “Philly Officer Unites Community with Karaoke,” July 27, 2019, https://6abc.com/post/philly-officer-unites-community-with-karaoke/5423247/.
Refer to the project Moms 4 Housing, https://moms4housing.org.
As J. T. Roane illustrates in “Plotting the Black Commons,” Souls 20, no. 3 (2018), “Practices centered in the various iterations of the plot—the site of the body’s interment, the garden parcel, and hidden insurrectionary activity—fostered a vision of de-commodified water and landscapes as well as resources.”
Referring to Erin Manning’s Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (2012), exploring the concept of the “more than human” in the context of movement, perception, and experience.
George Washington Carver’s work in agriculture, while not explicitly using the term “regenerative agriculture,” laid the groundwork for many of its core principles. He focused on soil health, crop rotation, and using natural methods to improve farming practices, particularly in the impoverished South. His research, especially his work with peanuts and other nitrogen-fixing crops, helped revitalize depleted soils and empower farmers.
In his essay “In Defense of Conviviality and the Collective Subject,” Polis 11, no. 33 (2012), Manuel Callahan “takes up the question of a ‘new’ social paradigm by first examining the recent emergence of the U.S. Occupied Movement (OM) as a provocative and inspiring moment of political re-composition, but one that also narrates a more complex unraveling of what W. E. B Du Bois called democratic despotism.”
Refer to the freethought collective’s summit “Infrastructure of Feeling,” http://freethought-collective.net/curatorial-projects/infrastructure-of-feeling.html.
In Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (2025), Tavia Nyong’o establishes the distinction of temporality used in Black art, specifically the distinctions between Chronus—the personification of time, specifically measured, linear time—contrasted with Kairos, the qualitative or opportune time.
There is no off-stage in this performance, but the staging of a departure to symbolize such.
In Lucretius’s philosophy, clinamen refers to the swerve or inclination of atoms, a concept crucial to his Epicurean worldview. It describes the unpredictable, minute deviation of atoms from their otherwise straight, downward path through the void. This swerve is essential for explaining how atoms can collide, creating the possibility for the formation of the universe and all its components, including living beings. Without the clinamen, all atoms would fall straight down, never interacting, and no complex structures could ever arise.