Abstract

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Haptic Communion. Sensuality and Choreography in Geoffrey Holder’s Dance Paintings and Collages

– Alexandra Thomas and Luke Williams

Riffing on Marcia Siegel’s notion of dance as a “perpetual vanishing point,” Jose Muñoz claims that “No other art is so hard to catch, so impossible.” In Geoffrey Holder’s paintings, the surviving traces of intimate touches and exuberant dances are imagined and memorialized. Our contribution to the edited volume considers haptic communion, sensuality, and choreography in Holder’s painterly representations of dance and touch. Drawing on our training in dance and performance studies, modern and contemporary art, and Black feminist theory, we examine numerous paintings by Holder made between the 1960s and his 2014 death. We argue that these works include impressionistic and abstract depictions of Black people in a series of different embraces: couples and friends dancing alone and in crowds, holding hands, and making love, illustrating many ways to touch, and be touched. These paintings of Black people activating touch raise questions about the relationship between intimacy, gender, and sexuality as well as the visual possibilities of painting dance and joyful movement.