Stripper Poles and Ballet Barres: Kandis Williams on the Politics We’re Forced to Perform

Central to A Surface, Kandis Williams’s 2025 survey exhibition at the Walker, was Triadic Ballet: a 2021 movement score captured on variable-channel video as performed by Natasha Diamond-Walker (the work is now also part of the Walker’s permanent collection). The title and geometric floor grounding the performance are nods to early twentieth-century painter and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. But Williams’s range of references extends beyond this moment of modernist utopianism to encompass contemporary social dance, militarized movement, ballet, and the bodily repetitions of agrarian ritual.

From this mélange, the artist and scholar stages an exploration of Black embodiment: how physical gestures born from historical restrictions on movement and the development of a cross-diasporic means of hyper-communication became global cultural blueprints, the raw materials for endless viral TikTok loops cuing their viewers in a certain emulatable mode of publicness. For viewers of Triadic Ballet, however, Williams hopes the experience prompts pause and reflection on the complexities of race as a spectacle and our internalized obligations to perform a given politics.