Taking its title from the term given to improvisational dance circles formed in clubs and other gatherings, Cypher is an ongoing project bridging still and moving image with performance that embraces the relational, cyclic structure of cyphers as an ethic and methodology to reframe our notions of being, time, and space for collective survival.

Born out of underground clubs in the 70s with deep historical roots in communal dance traditions, cyphers provided ephemeral spaces for predominantly Black and queer communities to seek refuge from systems of oppression and find freedom expressing themselves in the center of these dance circles that responded to them in kind. As I dance alongside these communities today, each still image begins as a gelatin silver print from a long-exposure negative capturing dancers in my community. Echoing the freestyle exchanges of the cypher, I iteratively perform gestures that “dodge and burn” across the prints and unexposed photopaper. The unpredictable compositions inform my movements in a process that turns the darkroom itself into a performance space and an extension of the club. Through successive transformations, each piece shifts towards abstraction as my movements are subsumed in the final images where bodies distill into essence, presence becomes absence, form becomes spirit.

Together with photogrammed original poetry and experimental documentary video integrating found archival footage, the project realizes a multimodal expression of embodied experience moving between communal joy and meditative solitude, swiftness and stasis, past and present. In an increasingly polarized society, Cypher invites us to dissolve boundaries separating the individual from the collective and instead let each flow into the other in a perpetual becoming—the traces of history guiding us in an ongoing dance across time, space, and light.