After participating in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, I felt hopeless because I wanted the capitalist death machine to collapse, but the protests eventually died out. I then learned about 400 pilot whales who died off the coast of Tasmania after being stranded there, and connected whale death to Black death and thought about how the whale bodies feed the ocean when they die.

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Brooklyn, New York, on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are on the faculty at Movement Research NYC, Editor-in-Chief of Movement Research Performance Journal, and the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black. www.improvisingwhileblack.com