140 x 178mm, 24 pages, Black & white printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, 2023

In 1982, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker choreographed “Come Out” as part of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, a performance that uses variation and repetition in order to “think about the relationship between music and dance.” In 1966, Reich composed “Come Out,” commissioned to raise funds for the retrial of the Harlem Six—Wallace Baker, Daniel Hamm, William Craig, Ronald Felder, Walter Thomas, and Robert Rice—who were arrested in 1964 for a murder for which there remains no proof of their connection. Reich’s track features a four-second audio clip on loop spoken by Hamm during a taped interview with civil rights activist Truman Nelson that also provided material for Nelson’s 1968 book The Torture of Mothers. Throat Draw Come Out With It takes notes on this trajectory: how seventy hours of tape became four seconds became a book became a song became a dance. In doing so, it examines how abstraction and adaptation work in relation to historical subjectivity.

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