Under Pressure, Black Performance Theory Convening Makes Space to Breathe, Witness and Create
By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts
Hosted at Howard and Georgetown universities, the 15th invitation-based Black Performance Theory convening brought scholars together to explore pressure through Black performance scholarship, collective creation and intergenerational exchange.
Before discussing pressure, the scholars gathered at Howard University on Friday morning were asked to breathe.
Hands rested against hearts and bellies. Shoulders loosened. Heads lowered. Together, the room inhaled and exhaled.
It was a small act, but an intentional one.
As more than 30 scholars began the first full day of Black Performance Theory 2026: Pressure, they were invited to resist one of the most familiar impulses of academic gathering: the urge to immediately speak.
Those inclined to be “loquacious,” the room was reminded, might instead pause long enough to consider “what the silence might birth.” Responses, when they came, were encouraged to fit “inside of a breath.”
For a gathering organized around pressure—the forces that weigh upon people and institutions, as well as those exerted to move, resist, touch, create and change—the invitation offered an early glimpse into how the weekend would unfold. Here, pressure would not simply be studied. It would be explored through bodies, conversation, performance, listening and community.
Held across Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts and Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center, Pressure marked the 15th invitation-based convening of the Black Performance Theory (BPT) working group, a collective dedicated to advancing Black performance scholarship through the study, theorization and practice of African Diasporic expressive cultures.
An Intellectual Prelude
The work had begun the afternoon before.
On Thursday, September 24, Thomas F. DeFrantz, professor at Northwestern University and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture | Technology, helped open the gathering at Howard with the lecture Lines of Elaborated Flight and Time: Baroque Black Performance.
DeFrantz explored elaboration as a method of improvisation within Black aesthetic structures, moving across Black dance, Édouard Glissant, the fold, the fan, flying Africans, vogue and the persistence of time to consider how Black performance might generate new relationships beyond existing structures.
By Friday morning, those questions had moved from the lecture into the circle.
Participants were asked not to recite the accomplishments already captured in their biographies, but instead to introduce themselves “in a breath”—to offer who they were and what they wanted others to know about them in that particular moment.
The introductions revealed a room whose scholarship stretched across Black feminist and queer performance, dance, visual culture, jazz, carnival, spirituality, Shakespeare, cultural heritage, Black storytelling, mental health and diasporic studies.
But the circle also created space for what professional biographies often leave out.
There were new books and manuscripts. Academic appointments. Family milestones. Scholars sharing the questions newly occupying them. There was laughter, too—the kind that comes from people who understand both the seriousness and occasional absurdity of making a life inside the academy.
Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, chair of Howard’s Department of Theatre Arts, introduced herself as a director and dramaturg who does “work that the ancestors asked me to do.”
Later, participants were given another deceptively simple prompt:
“I hope we will discuss…”
The responses expanded the meaning of pressure almost immediately.
They named anxiety and the Black body. Love and grief. Land and displacement. Mental health. Pleasure and Black joy. Archives. Radicalism. Teaching. Time. The relationship between hope and patience, and the difference between what is real and what is true.
They wondered how Black intellectual spaces could be built within institutions—and how those institutions might be made to sustain them.
One participant hoped to discuss preventing Black burnout.
Another acknowledged already being there.
“I’m beyond burnout,” they said, before arriving at the question underneath it: How do we rebuild ourselves?
The moment reflected one of the gathering’s clearest through-lines. The questions circulating in the room were intellectual, but never only intellectual. Again and again, participants returned to how Black performance scholarship might inform the ways they teach, create, parent, administer, lead and move through the world.
Dean Raquel Monroe, Ph.D., one of the conveners of Pressure, named that connection directly, asking how the theories scholars develop might become actualized across the many dimensions of their lives.
In that sense, the gathering asked not only what scholars know about Black performance, but what Black performance scholarship can teach them about how to live.
Patience, Waiting and Witnessing
Those questions took on another dimension through the gathering’s shared reading: Julius B. Fleming Jr.’s “Introduction: Impatient to Be Free,” from his book Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation.
Fleming examines the relationship between Blackness, performance and time, including the ways waiting has historically been imposed upon Black people as a mechanism of racial power—and the ways Black political and artistic traditions have resisted demands to wait for freedom.
Against that framework, the morning’s emphasis on silence and patience carried particular resonance.
Within the circle, waiting was not presented as passive surrender. Pausing became intentional. It created room to listen, observe and allow someone else to enter before filling the space again.
That practice was connected to another central BPT tradition: witnessing.
Participants described the witness not as a passive spectator, but as someone charged with paying careful attention—to what is happening in the room, how people relate to one another and what becomes visible when the impulse to immediately respond is suspended.
For scholars navigating universities and other institutions, listening was also framed as a form of discernment: understanding who is sitting across the table before deciding how to move.
From Theory to Collective Creation
By Friday afternoon, the gathering shifted from conversation into creation.
Following lunch at Howard, participants traveled to Georgetown University, where they divided into seven groups for collaborative work and rehearsal.
The structure reflected the methodology that has distinguished BPT gatherings across nearly three decades. Rather than relying exclusively on conventional conference papers or panels, BPT creates room for dance, theatre, poetry, film, improvisation and other forms that allow scholars to perform theory as well as discuss it.
On Saturday, the seven groups reconvened to share what they had created.
And the roles shifted again.
Those watching became witnesses.
Across the presentations, participants were asked to resist the instinct to immediately explain or evaluate what they had seen, holding space long enough for multiple perspectives to emerge.
The gathering’s structure made the relationship between scholarship and performance tangible. Ideas generated through readings and conversation could move through bodies, voices, images, and improvisation. Scholars could test an argument not only through language on a page, but through what happened when people made something together.
The process was also intentionally intergenerational.
Senior scholars worked alongside junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, creating a space in which emerging scholars could encounter the field not simply by studying the people within it, but by making work beside them.
Who Is Looking Out for You?
On Sunday morning, the gathering returned to Howard, where the final conversation turned explicitly toward professional life.
A “Dream Jobs and Mentorship” discussion brought participants together to consider mentorship across different stages of an academic career and the kinds of support necessary to sustain scholars over time.
Mentorship, participants emphasized, does not become unnecessary with seniority.
There is no point at which someone simply arrives and no longer needs another person looking out for them.
That idea carried particular weight after a weekend in which scholars had spoken openly about burnout, institutional pressure, creative uncertainty and the desire to build spaces capable of sustaining both rigorous intellectual work and the people doing it.
Pressure was convened by Anita Gonzalez of Georgetown University, Thomas F. DeFrantz of Northwestern University, La Marr Jurelle Bruce of the University of Maryland and Raquel Monroe of Howard University.
Over the course of the gathering, however, the organizing question expanded beyond any single definition of pressure.
What happens when Black scholars confront the forces pressing against their bodies, disciplines, institutions and communities?
What does it mean to apply pressure in return?
And what becomes possible when the response is not always greater force, but sometimes collaboration, care, patience, improvisation or rest?
The gathering did not settle on one answer.
Instead, it made room for many: scholarship and performance. Urgency and patience. Speech and silence. Agitation and rest. Individual expertise and collective creation.
And perhaps one of the weekend’s earliest gestures offered one of its most enduring possibilities.
Before the theories, performances and questions came the breath.
And with it, the invitation to leave enough space to discover what the silence might birth.
To learn more about Black Performance Theory, visit https://finearts-comms.wixsite.com/bpt2026-pressure.
