Like the queen piece in chess
they move up, down, forward, back,
across the field of the text, but
are not the text.
They speak tongues.
They err on purpose.
They misspell perceptions.
They run.
Bodies motivated by language,
by users,
by others.
They dance.
Cursor muses on the computer cursor as a kind of body, beholding the graphic as a “protagonist and expectant messenger,” with dance, writing, voice, and objects.
Will Rawls is a New York-based choreographer, performer, curator and writer. His work explores the relationship between dance and language through the prisms of blackness, abstraction and opacity. Rawls’s choreographic work has appeared at Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Danspace Project; New Museum of Contemporary Art, Issue Project Room; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; Fisher Center at Bard; Abrons Arts Center. In 2016 he co-curated Lost and Found, a six-week program of performances, artist projects and panels at Danspace Project that considered the intergenerational impact of HIV/AIDS on dancers, women and people of color. His writing has been published by Artforum, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and les presses du réel. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant and is Currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
Cursor is organized by Cori Olinghouse for the CCS Bard Speaker Series. Cursor was commissioned by ISSUE Project Room and developed throughout 2018 by Will Rawls as a part of ISSUE’s annual Artist-in-Residence program.