Kandis Williams and Roderick George
Annexation Tango
2019
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Physical Qualities
Single-channel video (color, sound), Duration: 10 minutes, 31 seconds
Credit Line
Gift of Andrew Xue, Singapore
Object Number
2021.180
Set against the musical backdrop of a tango, a lone dancer appears amidst expansive fields, pastures, prisons, and plantation-style homes, all of which depict locations of historical imprisonment and enslavement. On-site and greenscreen photography place the dancer in fields that belonged to the Lorton Reformatory and the Virginia State Prison Farm, where incarcerated people were made to work as a condition of their sentences.
The dancer blends tango with other dance styles that draw from traditions of the African diaspora. While the tango is often believed to have originated in Argentina, Africans thieved to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade shaped significant elements of the dance. Annexation Tango speaks to this gradual annexation and erasure of African influence from the tango and reclaims this history through the power of movement. Sweat shows the physical demands of the dance and echoes the effort of labor, both historic and ongoing.
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