keyon gaskin prefers not to spell out their work, embracing a degree of unintelligibility to be able to live and work on their own terms. The title of their Time-Based Art Festival premiere, tbd: to be diasporic un determined, conveys this wish for an open-endedness that creates space for new imaginaries. What I witnessed in the performance at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s 2025 TBA Festival felt like a co-creation of a world in the making; a portal to (Black) possibility. I will try here to invoke my impressions of that world, as a white woman in the margins of its full significance, leaving it “un determined”:

It was, from the first moment, a magical world; a world with silvery-black mountains that, when filled with light, became translucent, revealing the presence of a single person in each; a body moving in its own way. These Black bodies were beyond gender, and everything and everyone was connected, inter-communicating silently like a mycelial fungal system. Small fragment-like lights shone in the spines of those mountains and sometimes they looked like star constellations in the darkened space. There was a shimmering, and a glimmering, of light projected on walls, and there were moments when someone sat and haunted the space with song. And there were other sounds – a shrieking, a humming, a long whimpering, music from silver sound equipment. A statuesque figure stood there sometimes, covered in a shroud, or played unshrouded, a between-worlds DJ. Once, a figure squatted close to a wall, their back turned, and there was strumming.

keyon offers a citation in the TBA handbook by scholar Stephanie Leigh Batiste that resonates with how the play of light and dark in the performance contributed to the self-transformational world being co-created live by the performers: “Darkening refers to the participation of people, traditionally understood as ‘dark’, in the formation of their own identities through imagination of internal belonging and oceanic crossing.” Some moments of the performance stood out like lucid dreaming. Once, a door rolled open upwards, and a tall figure bent their body underneath and walked inside on stilts. It may have been a beggar or a prophet: To me it felt like both, and they carried in their hand two long wooden poles that reminded me of the wands in tarot cards; they felt mercurial in spirit. Later, much later it seemed, there was the screeching and scraping and the partial opening of a huge garage door and a person’s body rolled in, bound in a rope-like hose. These figures appear in my mind as both mythic and futuristic. All were clothed in fragments of fabric — some soft and velvety, some gauze-like or silky, and all were grey; a steely grey that felt like the future. It was only at the end, when they gathered by the unbound body and stood side by side, pouring water from a hose over each other’s heads, that I could count six persons, although they had seemed more. There was a quiet laughing now, a togetherness, a shared joy.

keyon’s recent work has often had as its undertow the conditions of the Black body performing itself (for predominantly white audiences) rather than simply performing as a neutral (read white, cis-gendered) performer. Seeing keyon in the company of these collaborators, there was a sense of community that was different, even, than other collaborations I have seen them undertake over the seven years I have watched them perform.

Later, I sat outside on PICA’s terrace and keyon came by, and I told them I had sensed that something had shifted in their practice, a certain closeness, a different way of being in community. This intimacy, keyon told me, was sparked by the togetherness of an open-ended workshop that brought them together, created through a residency at PICA, co-supported by the National Performance Network (NPN), which co-commissioned the performance. keyon told me that this intimacy was sparked by the togetherness of an open-ended workshop they created, inviting these performers into dialogue while in residence at PICA this summer. This process was co-supported by the National Performance Network (NPN), which co-commissioned the performance.

Performing together for the first time and holding space for a remarkable improvisational and deeply collaborative practice, tbd: to be diasporic un determined spoke keyon’s artistic language fluently, and yet it also spoke of something new. There was a lot of hope in the performance that, even in the midst of the current “sense of envelopment, if not doom, in the ubiquitous effects of power,” there was the glimmer of a future where “such thick instrumental and infinite selections” “become ineffectual – the mirrors darkened, possibility reborn,” as the quotation from Batiste has promised. keyon will travel the performance and reimagine it with other performers at The Luminary in St. Louis and the Chocolate Factory in New York, co-commissioners of the work with PICA. I just wish I could see all of their performances.

tbd: to be diasporic un determined was performed at PICA on September 11 and 13, 2025, by keyon gaskin and collaborators Amenta Abioto, Isaiah Spriggs, Jacque Hammond, Jared Dancler and Syon.