Arts: Visual and Performing

Nicholas Fesette, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, OXFORD COLLEGE, HUMANITIES DIVISION

John Brown Bodies (TM)

John Brown Bodies (TM) is a solo theatre performance that focuses on the contested legacies of the 19th-century white American abolitionist John Brown. It is a satirical investigation of the histories of white anti-racism using poetic autobiography and calisthenic exercise: a deconstruction of the spectacle of white male embodiment that mashes up performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith with aerobics star Richard Simmons. URC funds will support the research and development of the theatre script, which centers on a character called “Personal Traitor,” a fitness trainer who demonstrates the services offered at the fictional wellness organization, John Brown Bodies (TM). His redneck beard and Vanilla Ice hair glistening with sweat, the Personal Traitor humorously narrates his own wellness journey to dismantle the capitalist imaginaries, cisheteropatriarchal yearnings, and colonial inheritances that kept him from “getting gains.” To the sounds of surreal techno thumping, he lunges, jumps, pumps, and headstands while offering into his headset out-of-breath critical reflections on whiteness. The second part of the performance breaks the fourth wall to share smoothies and dialogue with the audience about American history, embodiment, and racism. This community conversation strives to imagine how, in counter-response to histories of racial violence, we can supplant the mythic idol of “John Brown’s body” with thinkers of the Black radical tradition.