These questions are the heart of ANTIMORTEM. I search for their answers by engaging with the materials that Luther left behind in his personal archive. Placing his materials in conversation with my own original footage, I forge fertile liminal space between ancestry and the present, the vision of our forebears and the fruit of their labor. 

ANTIMORTEM is also a conversation between the different dance forms that are fundamental to the Black American dance tradition. Luther was deeply engaged with both performing and teaching the disciplines of tap dance and West African dance—two distinct forms with varying levels of empowerment and fraughtness for an African American man from Missouri. I probe not only how Luther personally related to each form, but what that means in the context of black life and black death more broadly.

Above all, my work is a provocation to deeply (re)consider the potentiality that exists within personal family archives. By shifting our focus to the knowledge and knowledge production beyond the mainstream, I argue that we are able to excavate rich blueprints for today. By leaning into vernacular Black culture, I explore what new traces emerge. By writing his story antemortem through a shrewd, unlikely archival practice, I reflect on whether Luther (and therefore we) can refuse death as it is understood in western contexts. That is, if we can develop a practice of ANTIMORTEM.