What do we ask them to do?

Give us movement.  Juba was a dancer, famous for his speed, his acrobatics, his grace, his ability to imitate and parody, and his use of the whole body in his dance.

Give us sound and word.  Juba was a percussionist, and he and his troupe made, from all accounts, an incredible racket.  He and his partners were singers, comics, satirists and pioneered audience-participation improvisation.

Give us images.  Juba and his contemporary performers are captured in woodcuts and prints, often twisted into abstract knots.  Their wardrobe was outrageous, and unsettling.

Use your imagination.  Multi-media, animated, digital—we’ll be interested in anything new.

We ask them, using their own art responding to Juba's, to explore and to comment on the world surrounding him. 

The eyewitnesses who tried to describe Juba admitted the impossibility of doing his artistry any justice, even as they imitated his rhythms in their speech, clinically described his movements, comparing them with every dance from the highland fling to Romantic ballet.  They gave it their best shot.  Our project reverses the process–by reading the documents and attempting to translate them back into performance.  The goal isn’t to recreate Juba’s dance or the folk performance that surrounded him.  It's about transmission.  What is left of the original when a translation of a difficult text is translated back again--after the grammar has changed.