Cat Mahari graduated from Central’s MA/MFA Performance Practice as Research course in 2011, and is a creator, choreographer, director, composer, and visual and scenographic artist. She has won numerous awards, including a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award and a 2021 3Arts / Walder Foundation Award in Dance, which recognises the contributions of Chicago’s women artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists.
Cat spoke with us about her practice, recent projects, and advice for those looking to follow in her footsteps.
Can you tell us a bit about your practice?
My arts practice is built from a richly layered body history, stemming from an archive of research, and physical training with the intent of manifesting an intellectual, material and informal grammar of liberation, via documentation, video and live performance. Through an examination of personal cultural markers and social genealogies, I explore the in-between of inner and outer environments. Hip Hop, concomitantly with other Black street dance social-geographies, fuel my practice, analysis and articulation.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a live performance exploring Ẹsẹ̀ntáyé, meaning “touch the feet to the earth”, and seeking an embodied manifesto of Blk liberation.
The project title derives from a Yoruba ceremony wherein a baby’s destiny is revealed. This pursuit of Ẹsẹ̀ntáyé is explored via an anarcho-choreographic Hip Hop approach to Blackness, and its relationship to the outside. Anarchochoreography as a refusal of the choreographed apparatuses of coloniality and its methodologies in performative binding, ties, community, and individual identity. I posit that the outside is a space of socio-politics and play, wherein liberatory Blkness blooms. Just like play, it fulfils itself in voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, and direct action. My work revels in the freedom of anarchochoreographic Hip Hop play towards a destiny in a wildstyle of Blk liberation.
I am also in post-production on a filmic project with Chicago House and Chicago Stepping called Sugar in the Raw: Loving Each Other, looking at intimacy, touch, and trust in Blkness, and am in what I call “the pre-prepatory phase” of working on a film centering Blk care in masculinities, which is really inspired by my brother Dr. Bill Johnson, and Frantz Fanon and Ousmane Sembene.
What are some of the main things you explore in your work?
I’ve always been really invested in dance, movement/s, and visual media, Blk folks, and the world.
In my practice I am continuously enraptured within the necessity of co-relating aesthetic and socio-politics, which is part of the heart of Hip Hop processes and productions. So being and centering Blkness, via Afrofuturity, social death, anarcho ways, is key to what Hip Hop, and other Black street/club dance compels those of us fixed on Black liberation to do. I like to posit play in Hip Hop movement as an unconstrainable spillage of Blk breath; and I enjoy digging deep into the power of its oscillation.
What has surprised you most about the work you’re currently involved in?
The most surprising thing about my journey is that I never know who’s gonna dig it, support it, or get it. And, I never know when someone’s gonna care. I just am compelled to care about what I care about.
Professionally, what has been the biggest challenge that you have overcome so far?
The biggest challenge in my work is that the processes take multiple years to flesh out, and in the communities that I create, and am created by, we must always be aware of disrespect and being selfishly taken advantage of. Combined with that is the precarity of being a full-time artist.
And finally, what advice would you have for anyone looking to follow in your footsteps?
My only advice is to find, use and practice your discernment and intuition. So much of your structural life is not - individually - under your control, but you’ve got to align yourself with something. And discernment and intuition will help.
Follow @kittymahari on Instagram, or visit Cat’s website, for further updates about her work.
Find out more about our MA/MFA Performance Practice as Research course.