The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company, Holly Bass’ latest work, conceptualizes one of the most urgent ideas of our time: what it means to be free and how we can all move towards an equitable and just society. The multidisciplinary performance and visual artist teams with Theater Alliance and the Anacostia Playhouse for 6 special performances.
“The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company is a dance theater piece that features three freedwomen who are moving to the south in the late 1860s who run a travelling medicine show, and it’s revealed that they are from the future,” Bass says. “They are from an egalitarian society, a world in which structural inequality has been eradicated. In their culture, they look at it as a sickness that has been cured.”
However, the story takes a twist when it’s learned a violent incident happens in the future and they hadn’t fully done their job, so the travelers have been sent back in time to try and get a handle on where the sickness came from and how they can eliminate it in the future.
“In 2010, I did a 15-minute performance called African Futures at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art and they asked me to create a short performance to go along with an exhibition they had on view and that’s where I got this idea of women from the future going back to the past,” Bass says. “Also, for many years in my artwork, I have had this costume piece which I started to call a body orb or a ‘bootyball,’ and it’s basically a strap-on derriere.”
The costume piece, she explains, relates to the story of Sarah Baartman, a woman from South Africa brought to Europe in the 1800s and put on display as a sideshow because of the infatuation with her buttocks.
“She ended up having a tragically short life and her story impacted me. That was also a jumping off point for me,” Bass says. “This costume piece looks like a bustle and using my imagination, I thought what if these body orbs were like a jet pack that these women used as a power force, sort of shifting it from public curiosity to something that was a point of pride.”
Bass worked with Jasmine Hearn and Kailasa Aqeel and together the trio asked questions such as “Where did these women come from?” “Who were they sent by?” and “How did they get this technology?”
“You let your imagination lead you down a path. A lot of this background won’t even show up in the play,” she says. “It’s important for us as performers to know the detailed background of all the characters and tying that to American history and an imagined history in the future.”
Bass has been artistic since childhood. She has memories from age six of writing poems that she would share with her family and of engaging in year-long soap operas with her Barbie dolls.
“My family had always been very encouraging with whatever I was doing—poetry, dance, theater—so that made it a lot easier for me,” she says. “I think the reason I became more of a performance artist is because I am a black woman. I felt the roles that were available to me in mainstream theater and performance were very limited. I decided at a pretty young age, really in college, that I would write my own material.”
Her writing process starts with improvisation, and a lot of times she doesn’t even finish a complete script until the show has been performed and she finishes it by writing transcriptions from the video.
“This show was a little different because it is in a formal theater setting so I have been diligently typing away,” Bass says. “Now, instead of using dolls from my younger days, I am using real people. But it’s a very active writing style.”
A big part of her impetus is trying to connect with what’s happening with the world today, and the new piece definitely reflects that.
“For many black Americans, we are experiencing time travel. Look at those people at the Starbucks who were arrested after waiting for a friend; it’s like they were transported to 1950, and they wanted to sit at the counter,” she says. “It’s a surreal experience. You think it’s 2018, but depending on where you go and who sees you, it’s like you’re being pulled back in time like an Octavia Butler novel.”
“I hope people who come to see this leave thinking about freedom as something that is truly inalienable and that we are born with it,” Bass says. “I hope they think of how we restrict our own freedom and other people’s freedom so we can observe our behavior and be a catalyst for change in our own families and our own local communities.”
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