Octavia Butler Meets Grant D. Venerable in "Parable of the Pathmakers"

"Do you wanna hear what the quantum field sounds like?"

d. Sabela grimes prompted the audience and played an echoing audio clip of Octavia Butler's voice:

"Ummm."

In March, "Parable of the Pathmakers," an Afrofuturist multimedia dance performance, opened a portal into the minds and legacies of Pasadena-born science-fiction author Octavia Butler and Caltech's first Black graduate, Grant D. Venerable (BS '32) on Caltech's campus.

The performance by SiriusShapeShifters—a creative collaboration between grimes, a dancer, choreographer, and professor at USC's Kaufman School of Dance, and Meena Murugesan, a video and dance artist—combined video projection, dance, and audio-collage in a lush multisensory experience. The event marked part of a yearlong celebration of Venerable at Caltech led by curator jill moniz, which began with a community conversation in October 2023 that brought together Caltech students and the Venerable family.

"After the community conversation, I wanted to try something different," says moniz of the event series. "I was deeply moved by the way the students spoke of Venerable House and their community, so I wanted to take the opportunity to stop talking and tap into a different kind of logic.

"What SiriusShapeShifters does is channel—through Butler—this Afrofuturist possibility. And when I think about Venerable moving through this space, that's what he was doing. He was making space for these possibilities. I thought this performance would be the most profound, visceral, and emotional way that I could tap into his experiences and share them with the community."

"Parable of the Pathmakers" is part of a series of Octavia Butler-inspired performances by SiriusShapeShifters called Parable of Portals. During the show, grimes and Murugesan live-mixed audio and video from behind a DJ booth onstage alongside three large video projections. grimes stepped out from behind the booth and moved fluidly through roles: emceeing, singing, performing spoken-word poetry, and dancing. He was joined onstage by dancer Brianna Mims.

After the performance, moniz joined Murugesan, grimes, and Mims onstage for a discussion and audience Q&A. Below are some excerpts from the conversation.

moniz:

"One of the reasons why I was so interested in connecting you both [Murugesan and grimes] and Parable of Portals to this project at Caltech is because when you're world-building, it is often prophetic, right? Nobody knows quite what you're doing. And I was thinking about Grant Venerable and thinking about the fact that he was walking this campus alone, in a way, representing the totality of his people and himself and his thoughts and his own ideas of what his future could look like—but holding the space all the time, pushing it open, holding it up, keeping it open. And now in 2023 and 2024 we're here and recognizing him in that way, on this campus, against the kind of frontiers that were happening when he was here—against the eugenics movement, against an idea of manifest destiny to the West Coast. He was world-building something else that's here now, that Octavia Butler walked in the shadow of and opened up more light for. And so, to me, it was a very natural connection to make."

grimes:

"It definitely feels right. When you [moniz] gave us the information, we started doing research on Mr. Venerable and found, here we have yet another—I don't want to say pioneer, right? It's not the connotation—but, yet another non-white person that is dreaming themselves into being every microsecond, dreaming themselves into being. There's a spectrum of violence that happens in integrated schools, whether it's a stare or whether it's closing the door on someone, whether it's calling someone something, all of these things that are endured. And the flip side of that is, I just imagined Venerable dreaming himself into being, which is another reason why improvisation was really important for this project. We are improvising. So, everything that we're doing, we have a score, an outline that we improvise within. When we talk about systems of intelligence, I feel like that is a deep, structured system of intelligence navigating a world like that."

moniz:

"All of the arts really tap into that knowledge system that is not economical knowledge or a scholarly knowledge, but it is a deep-rooted, deep-generational understanding that's both sort of cosmic, ethereal, but also rooted, like you [grimes] said, rooted where you are, where you come from, where you have emerged, where you've walked, where you go, right?

"That it is something more than what you can calculate in your head, but it's being open to a language or multiple languages that allow you to move through the world in a completely different way and allow you to survive uninhabitable worlds that don't want you.

"One of the things that Octavia Butler said is you have to feel. There is no separation between science and feeling; this resonance is so important. At the end of the day, you have to communicate so that people feel and understand that resonance. And I think that with this dance and performance, what I was hoping for, which to me was accomplished very nicely, is that you [SirirusShapeShifters] got us into that space, that sort of limbic resonance that we can feel in our bodies, through your body and the way that you were world-building on the stage. So, it was really everything I hoped for to honor both Octavia and Grant."