[siccer]
Performance Space New York, New York — November 20-22, 2025+
The Kitchen, New York — October 16 - November 22, 2025*
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles — April 5 - August 31, 2025*
REDCAT, Los Angeles — April 10-12, 2025+
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art — September 23-November 5, 2023*+ (*PerformancesOctober 6-8)
On the Boards, Seattle — September 28-30, 2023+
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago - April 27-30, 2023+
The Momentary, Bentonville — March 7 - October 8, 2023*+ (*Performances April 21-22)
*=installation
+=performances
Will Rawls, whose multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the tension between movement, language, and image, invites audiences to perceive the body’s many forms of communication. [siccer] draws from the Latin adverb [sic]; a term used in text to mark errors, often when quoting Black vernacular within the framework of standardized English. Rawls turns this conflict on its head to illuminate the verbal and physical play of Black performance as something that eludes capture on screen and in language—and that speculates on potential strategies for narrating the world, uncorrected.
Both the exhibition and performance fuse photography, cinema, and performance to challenge the boundaries between the living and the captured, the rehearsed, and the improvised. As language mutates and movement dissolves and reassembles, [siccer] asks: What does it mean for Black performers to resist capture? What new ways of seeing—and being—become possible in that refusal? In an ever-lasting cultural moment defined by the entanglement of Blackness and spectacle, [siccer] offers a speculative space to imagine alternative ways of being that refract and reshape the scene of spectacle-making—a film shoot. With a visual language that feels at once suspended and in flux, the work speaks powerfully to the complex visibility of Blackness in an image-saturated, surveillance-driven world.
Concept, Choreography, and Direction: Will Rawls
Performance: Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Sound Design and Vocals: Holland Andrews and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Technical Director: David Szlasa
Lighting and Scenic Designer: Maggie Heath
Costume Designer: Saša Kovačević, Dana Doughty
Dramaturg: Kemi Adeyemi
Studio Rawls Studio Director: Margaret Knowles
[siccer] Producer: Benedict Nguyễn
[siccer] was originally commissioned by The Kitchen in partnership with co-commissioners, The Momentary, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, On the Boards, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. [siccer] was made possible, in part, by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is a Creative Capital Project. [siccer] is also a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project which is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). [siccer] also received substantial developmental support from THINKLARGE.US, a family run nonprofit created by Don Quinn Kelley and Sandra L. Burton to aid in the creation of new work. [siccer] is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature through the Media Arts Assistance Fund a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm.
[siccer] was developed and supported, in part, by residencies at The Momentary and Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts, with additional support by On the Boards and The Kitchen; a creative residency at Petronio Residency Center, a program of the Stephen Petronio Company; with financial, administrative and residency support from Dance in Process at Gibney with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Movement Research; the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles and The Hammer Museum Residency; the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University; with production support and residency provided by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Williams College and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
The forthcoming [siccer] album was made possible with support from the Barbara Streisand Center for the Study of Women at UCLA.