What do gestures communicate outside of speech, and who receives the signals? Inspired by a riff on the sour punchline “Everybody wanna be a Black woman, but nobody wanna be a Black woman,” Notes on Gesture creates an inventory of authentic and dramatic motions. The video compiles isolated gestures often associated with Black women, or representations of Black women, in various forms of media as they are appropriated, repeated, circulated, and imitated. The piece alternates between title cards proposing hypothetical situations and short, looping clips detaching the actor’s signals in a sort of technical glitch. With repeated and reinterpreted movement, Syms weaves an examination of representation and Blackness.