Written Inquiry explores the relationship between embodiment, memory, performance, visual culture, and cultural meaning through scholarly writing, creative works, and reflective practice. These texts investigate how knowledge is produced, transmitted, and experienced across artistic, cultural, and intellectual traditions.
Written Inquiry
Published Scholarship
Black Dance: A Collage of Embodied Language Systems
Published in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3
This essay examines Black dance as an embodied language system through which cultural memory, historical experience, and social meaning are transmitted and reimagined across the African Diaspora. Bridging performance studies, visual culture, anthropology, and embodied theory, the work considers how movement operates as both archive and epistemology — carrying forms of knowledge that exceed the limits of text and institutional record.
“The body carries histories that exceed the limits of text.”
Read the full essay in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies:
https://liminalities.net/21-3/black-dance.pdf
Creative Inquiry Archive
Indifferent Reverence (2017)
Indifferent Reverence is a one-act play exploring perception, interpretation, and aesthetic experience through the encounter between viewers and a work of art. Set within a contemporary gallery, the work examines how memory, desire, projection, and emotional experience shape the ways individuals understand both art and one another.
Originally presented as part of Thematic Thursdays: Cracks in the Wall at Park Avenue United Methodist Church in New York City, the play centers on a simple question: What do we see when we look at a work of art, and what does that reveal about ourselves?
Reflection
Looking back, Indifferent Reverence reveals an early engagement with questions that continue to shape my interdisciplinary practice today. The work explores how meaning is constructed through experience, how art functions as a site of self-recognition, and how individuals project memory, identity, and affect onto cultural objects.
Many of these concerns would later re-emerge in projects such as Conversations with Rothko, my digital collage practice, Black Dance: A Collage of Embodied Language Systems, and my ongoing research on embodied archives and cultural memory.
What began as a theatrical exploration of perception has become a broader inquiry into the ways art, performance, memory, and embodied experience generate knowledge and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.
Selected Excerpt
SUZANNE
Maybe it's not a reprimand. Maybe it's a call for assistance. Maybe I can't remove the experience and what I need is for the person to imbue me with a counter experience so that it would now become something else. Maybe I need different colors to be added to the palette so that what was once icy becomes velvety and warm.
DAVID
I guess in an effort to only see the good I run the risk of not being able to see the pain and how I can fix it.
...
I see it now. I see the coolness in the work. The smudged charcoal colors that I didn't see before.
...
I see the fear.
Documentation
Indifferent Reverence
A One-Act Play
Written by Winston A. Benons Jr.
Originally presented as part of Thematic Thursdays: Cracks in the Wall
Park Avenue United Methodist Church
New York, NY
June 29, 2017
Read the full script (PDF)
© Winston A. Benons Jr. All Rights Reserved.