Artist, choreographer, and here, a rogue animator, Will Rawls stop-motions bodies through a catalogue of perceptions in a flood of green.

The hiss and snap of Latin that is [sic], always bracketed, marks a deviation from the standard, from what is “correct” in a written work. [sic] denotes to any reader wondering if it is a typo, that no, it is not. The title of Rawls’s choreographed performance, [siccer], cuts with its own poetry and puns: illness growing more so, a particular patois for a kind of comparative cool and a hard lean into that deviation. And for Black people whose way of speaking is often deemed a deviation by numerous (often white) linguistic authorities, [sic] jangles this adjudged incorrectness. [siccer] slices and flips that pedantic insult into a critical cri de coeur.

Relentlessly worked and reworked through workshops and previous iterations for years, [siccer] at REDCAT at a glance appears to have the texture of a very heavily labored improv class, sketchy sketches done with a rough-and-ready verve. But as the performance skitters and shifts, the symphonic variety of this exercise in style becomes an odyssey—a kaleidoscope of modes that slip from slapstick absurdity and gospel-inflected lament to trash-house trap theatrics and sudden, cinematic freeze-frame. The fluid grace and talent of the performers—Holland Andrews, Keyon Gaskin, Jess Pretty, Katrina Reid, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste—were challenged by the soft endurance required of this thing, but they still remember their levity and humor, the loose joy of movement and dance. From turns playfully ridiculous and heartbreakingly serious, you could feel with each swoop and turn, declaration and dialogue, that they were enjoying themselves. And at its heart (as the program notes relay), it is a consideration of “the ways in which Black bodies are relentlessly documented, distorted, and circulated in the media.”11“[siccer],” REDCAT website, accessed July 31, 2025, https://www.redcat.org/events/2025/will-rawls. Rawls’s expert choreography of the hundred ways Black people are seen, from sorrow to hilarity, is lathered with a nerdy kind of genre knowledge with songs nabbed from television variety shows to improvisational interludes that the performers call “bop”22Adanya Gilmore, “Reflections and Thoughts on Black Visibility in Will Rawls’s [siccer],” Sixty Inches From Center, July 10, 2023, https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/reflections-and-thoughts-on-black-visibility-in-will-rawlss-siccer/. and, in its wholeness, magic.

In stop-motion animation, every single movement is broken down into dozens if not hundreds of subtleties. There is no literal stop-motion rig onstage, but the dancers enact its illusion—holding poses mid-gesture, flicking limbs into delayed fixity—so that their bodies themselves become the frames. Rawls says in an interview, “Making stop-motion with real people is a process.”33“[siccer] | Will Rawls,” The Momentary, April 10, 2023, YouTube video, 02:05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZiF6XOKCFs. Applied to living bodies performing this catalogue, this expertise is revelatory. And though the performers are Black, the color to keep your eye on is green.

As it argues and reveals through genre again and again, green—from Kermit the Frog’s signature song “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” to the Emerald City of the all-Black theatrical revival of The Wiz, from green tattoos to Greenland and meadows—appears against a green-screen backdrop with green costumes and a scatter of translucent and opaque screens. The set also naturally includes a floating frog, occasionally beamed with light, a disco ball, and a chandelier. The scatter of each exercise, each genre, passes quickly, so if you struggle with one, wait and the weather changes.

Afterward, Rawls, in a Q&A, talked about the history of monochromes and what comes forward on a green screen and what falls back, what disappears—foregrounding the paradoxes of Black visibility. He referenced Kermit the Frog again, performing with Ray Charles in 1975 on The Cher Show: For Rawls, in that moment, green became the blues. And blues is the song, the soul, the lamentation of Black people in these United States.

Rawls’s deft deflection of blue and Black through green steps the conversation about race at a remove, permitting us to witness the absurdity and the horror in the manufactured limitations placed upon a color.

Accompanying the performance at REDCAT (or vice versa), Rawls installed an exhibition of the same name at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. One of the most impressive video installations in recent L.A. memory (or at least mine, for the way it lets space and subject breathe), Rawls turns the galleries into a massive stage. Not for official performers, but for the audience instead, who move through, catching the cut and curl of the videos as they flicker past. A prism, a reflection, a videographic manifestation of the live show, [siccer] here is thoughtfully particular to the expanded field and structural restrictions of the exhibition space.

Soft orange light beams along the edges of the walls. Spare cattails, like stage props, lend just a hint—along with a trio of irregular polygon carpets each with its own oversized pillows—of the suggestion of a swamp (promised on the wall text as we entered the gallery). The swamp, a place between water and land, is also here a place between art and dance, while likewise referencing swamps as a historical refuge and site of transformation for Black and Indigenous people.

The video installation takes us through the sequence of genres, with the somber beauty of the songs and cutting humor of the REDCAT performance. The suggested herk and jerk of stop-motion that is performed admirably in the live show is more easily done however with the hard, timely camera cuts that define this kind of filmmaking.

Along with its acuity, the rhythm and humor of the work, and the freedom to move through it, lend the installation a welcome calm: You could sink into a pillow and let the swallowing sounds and flickering light shiver through you. Rising again from the soft comfort, the beams sliding over my skin as I crossed the swamped stage, I felt freed from the stiff theater seat—and yet ever subtly aware of what it meant for a body, this body, to move through the cast of these colors.