Pandora's Box or Aunt Kizzy in the Kitchen? Avatar, an illicit memoir

In Second Life, I am homeless. Not only am I homeless, but I am trapped on some wild island with creatures similar to the ones I just saw in 3D in the film, Avatar. And this island was designed and is populated by Germans, who all have very intensely colored bodies and costumes.  I am dressed in flare jeans and baby doll dress top. I was asked if I was African, in German of course. That was about 2 years ago. I have not been back since.

It was not just the fact that the processor speed required to go 'in-world' was more than I was willing to dedicate--I cannot run any other programs when I am moving about the islands as Doctoradancer Congrejo--it was the supremely intense feeling of being dispossessed, of having no home site, nor base. Try as I might, I could not set a base and successfully return to it. To have a home, one needed to purchase it with Lindens, converted from dollars. That island was part of a treasure hunt for a fundraiser for the MS Foundation. I never found what I was looking for there, and since the island that was set as my anchor to that island disappeared when the game ended, I was trapped. In my mind at least.

I got into Second Life when I thought that I would not walk again. It was a logical, albeit technophilia-driven conclusion: if I could not dance with actual legs, my avatar could continue to make work and dance like a fiend. If only I could code!

So it was with great shock that I watched the first 7 minutes of Avatar.

I felt pressed in and dispossessed, like the main character Sully who was given no space to grieve, who watched flames lick a box that eerily reminded me of a warehouse Inworld where one could get free gear, clothing and even genitalia that was no longer wanted. Left over flesh. Left over life. A second chance. A Second Life.

And one that is very clearly not new.

Avatar the movie was achingly long, and literally painted with broad strokes and colors. I went because I had forgotten that this Cameron epic was to be based on Second Life; my son was thinking of a cute AirBender and really wanted to see it. We were both surprised: he pleasantly and I, well, I might need a bit of therapy.

This film danced all through my Double Consciousness. Erased, replaced and e-raced my triple Otherness. It threw my corpo-reality into disarticulated bits of capital and pimped my subalterity. I got worked.

Mainly, it made me sad in many, if not all, of my bodies. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild recently published a book on the terrain of the black dancer's body.


As I watched the CGI animation of the aliens, I could not help but notice those very familiar, hyper trained, lithe black jazz ballet bodies. I also knew for a fact that these were precisely the corpo-realities getting a once over because Lula Washington Dance Theatre had issued a press release about their work on the film. As gorgeous (and mystifying) as those bodies were, we never actually get to see them dance.

The audience was instead treated to 'negroid' as extraterrestrial. More than a few people have commented that really, this was "Dance With Aliens" or 'Pocohontas in the Space,"   but there were also deep rivers of Magical Negrophilia, homages to Conjuration, offerings to Bambara fractal math systems and I just heard a rumor that the language of Igbo was spoken directly (but likely only deeply borrowed). Africaninity is alien. 

Neytiri played by Zoë Saldana

CCH Pounder, Mo'at

Laz Alonso, Tsu'tey



SO alien in fact, contemporary bodies, practices and languages can be sourced to create an 'authentic' Other against the ultimate 'Military Industrial Complex Capitalist.' The Na'vi are an amalgamation of every First Nation person on the planet Earth that any European invasion has ever killed and/or displaced. There were the artificial "war whoops" from the Plains 'Injuns' made popular by Spaghetti Westerns. Then there were the chants of 'pygmies', the ulations of "Persians," the prayer trees and sacred groves of "Salt Water Negroes," the lethal athleticism of "Oceanic" and "Polynesian" people, the loin cloths of the "Indios" of Brazil--it does not matter that there are HUNDREDS of specific ethnic groups amassed under these degrading headings. That was the point. It was shorthand, undergirded by a soundtrack that did the same sonically. It was as if we were watching a recurring nightmare/sex fantasy of a greedy white pirate. Maybe we were. Set in such stark terms, Avatar then also played to the flip side, "empowering" subjugated people in the audience with their own racial justice fantasy. Notice who gets to carry the submachine guns, though.

Mostly messaging, and not much of a storytelling venture, Avatar glosses over some very important issues, takes them for granted; primary among them, the need to leave the Earth in search of resources. And what the hell was that resource for? Again, that's the point. Full of hints to actual conflagrations here on earth (in this case, the Congo where a precious mud delivers the minerals needed to make our cell phone casings lightweight and drives an unrelenting 'civil' war), Avatar is absolutely disingenuous and uninventive: one could profitably think of it as a "Down To Earth" (Chris Rock's 2001 remake of the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait) meets any Steven Segal film.

With this incredible shorthand, it is very easy for any white person in the audience to absolve themselves through the redemption of their personal Other. It is also very simple to fall into believing that thought and decision making are the true aliens. The hero Jack Sulley, played by Sam Worthington is selected by the Na'vi because his head is not so cluttered that his heart cannot be understood. While there is likely an entire paper there about the mind/body split and New Age Spirituality, I found myself getting queasy at the other side of this conclusion: the Na'vi, though seemingly rife with a sophisticated and equitable social structure, well-studied in botany, pharmacopeia and blessed with /designed for The Uplink (made me think about Ghost in the Shell when they linked those "ponytails" together) were too simple to deal with complex ideas, sentence structures and social habits.

I will now exhale.

Further complicating the missing storyline is the presence of very gifted physical actors, 'ghosting' in via their CGI renditions. I've written on the dilemma of motion capture and choreography at flowtv.org, developing a method for locating where the performance lies: in the capture, in the execution, in the choreography in the dancing, in the habits of the actor. Given the parameters of a world called 'Pandora,' and the heavy story already connected to said name in our contemporary moment, I found Lula Washington's choreography fitting: it seemed to signal just that moment of contact with the Divine, the nexus where body-owner slides out of the way of body-rider for the Uplink. But, I have always found that attempt in her work a bit forced, as if she is just re-enacting a version she read in a novel that was based on some ethnographic notes written 50 years earlier. 

Left to right, Lula Washington (choreographer of AVATAR), Christa Oliver (who danced in the film), AVATAR Writer/Director James Cameron, and Tamica Washington-Miller, who became a regular member of the Stunt/Motion Capture crew. Picture was taken at the private premiere for the cast and crew of AVATAR.


Lula's choreography, however, achingly reaches out of those scenes where it appears, yearning to be felt. It traverses the rituals that she choreographed and emanates in every frame where a Na'vi "body" appears. She worked on the film in 2007 and 2008, creating "body language for the indigenous people in the movie, AVATAR and used dancers in her company to provide motion for the Na Vi people […]." (Newsletter: "Lula Washington - Kwanzaa, AVATAR &; More." December 29, 2009) It is in the gait of the extras, in the lope of the creatures, in the stance of listeners, in the expansion and contraction of rib cages and nostrils, gills and wings. There is a black ache in the corpo-reality of this film that lends some credence to it. Magical Negro indeed. Cameron should fully fund Lula for allowing her company to be the body models for the captures. How ironic that the narrative insisted on "I see you" as the Na'vi phrase of honor/acknowledgment.

My avatar in Second Life is on a mystical island that looks a lot like Pandora. It is assumed to be African, my avatar that is. She has very large boobs, unlike me, because I could not figure out how to independently design them: the boob, hair color and facial angles came as an intro set. My skin color is close to my own, and here is where I look too much like a novice. When I walk or fly around, I constantly bump into people, it is hard to orient in that flat, yet 3D space. I am lost there, among some invented new natives who have likely tired of my carcass standing there on a hill with its head down, awaiting connection. As Sully's actual body lay in the trailer dying in the jungle of his dreams, I realized I was grabbing my own knees, remembering that feeling of floundering with only half the body able to rise against gravity. Then I remembered the elation of flying in my avatar while my actual ice cold feet awaited some sort of signal from any neuropeptide and the joy of 'running into' a student on an island, the delight of 'dancing.'

If only my super magical Negro Avatar had jumped through the looking glass to pick me up off the floor, and "seen" me…