The Long Way Home

“The Long Way Home” is a solo work by Christopher-Rasheem Mcmillan, originally presented with Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center on August 19, 2021. It poses a way of contending with the Black body as a composite body, one that is connected to, affirms, and disrupts the archive and Historiography. Through this solo dance performance, McMillan tracks the Merce Cunningham technique through diaspora, emphasizing that the diaspora is never the homeland: it’s never home, it’s always somehow both exile in migration and in travel; different from, yet somehow always in dialogue with, its genesis.

Christopher-Rasheem McMillan, is a performance-related artist and scholar. He has a joint appointment between Dance and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan received his BA from Hampshire College, his MFA in Experimental Choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London, and his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College, London (2017). His interests concern choreography in an expanded field, something that he has approached through experimental practices and creative processes in a multiplicity of formats and expressions. He uses video, performance, photography, and oral storytelling to explore themes of race, memory, queer desire, religion, personal and public mythology. McMillan’s performance works have been seen at venues such as the Bates Dance Festival of Bates College, Providence International Arts Festival (PVD), and The Dance Complex, and Green Street Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in performance platforms such as the 2011 participatory event Beyond Text, London. He was a Five College Fellow for the 2013–14 academic year and the recipient of the McGreggor-Girand Dissertation Fellowship for the 2014–15 academic year. His writing has been published in The Journal of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Kinebago, and Contact Quarterly. Currently, McMillan is a fellow and visiting assistant professor at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale College’s Theater and Performance Studies department.