Justin Allen, Tap Dance Drums Activated, 2023 (video still)
On writing, dancing, rhythm, and process
My works fall together in time, through a mix of research and making. Writing is always an element of the process, whether at the inception, during the final stages, or along the way. I don’t think about genre or medium when pursuing an interest or question because I let the content decide for me. My interest in language led me to construct one, which called me to write in it. When creating a unique script, I was called to draw. My interest in punk led me to assembling a band, making music, writing lyrics. For example, I wrote the poem 140 BPM to replicate the rhythm of techno music at a bar in Bushwick called Bossa Nova Civic Club. I let the music shape the form. When I recite the poem I usually lose my breath, like I’m dancing. The work tells me what to do.
The first section of the book opens with the work “Into the City” and takes the reader into a futuristic urban landscape. By the end of this first section, “Out of the City” takes the reader into suburbia. The second section focuses on my punk EP and thematically connects the musical influences of my suburban upbringing with my experiences in the fine art world in New York City. The final section possesses a similar oscillation: city-suburb, internal-external, self-collective. My memory and imagination function as the foundation of my work; if Language Arts were a physical passage or doorway to another place or time I imagine it would lead to the future, a city.
—Justin Allen (2024)
Foot Vox (excerpt)
Performance, Yale School of Art, March 6 and 10, 2023
A performance that activates my tap dance drums, instruments built from scrap wood and scrap metal and activated by tapping or maneuvering them with my feet to make rhythm. Equipped with contact mics, the drums' rhythms are looped and layered, then sent through a voice transformer to create melody.
Tap Dance Drums Activated, 2023 (excerpt)
This video documents my tap dance drums. I made the drums from scrap wood and scrap metal I got from bins in the wood and metal shop in grad school. I would bring the scraps to my studio and lay them together in various formations to determine how to assemble them. I like fluorescent colors for how visually loud they are, and thought they made sense for loud objects. I added a different color to each drum to give them distinct personalities.
Lyric Video - EP EP Track 3, 2022
Black Boots is a punk band with Savannah Harris on drums, Taja Cheek on bass, Tavish Timothy on guitar, and me writing and performing lyrics and vocals, and tap dancing. Our EP Ekphrastic Punk—released March 4, 2022—features songs responding to four different works by Black artists, composed in the styles of four different punk subgenres.
I recently created this lyric video for our song "Expliquez-moi La Totalité" after being inspired by fan-made lyric videos on YouTube and thinking about how they mix music, writing, and the image. This song was inspired by conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady’s concept of both/and—of being a product of both Africa and Europe, or of two seemingly contradictory or oppositional things—and describes my adolescent experience oscillating between Catholic church services in my Virginia suburb and Baptist services at my extended family’s church in DC.
Untitled, 2021
Video self-portrait that experiments with audio description, captioning, and dubbing to challenge the idea of a singular identity.