Posse Comitatus

2012 (work in progress)

Posse Comitatus is an ongoing collaboration with Chelsea Knight. We set out to investigate the militia movement, a grassroots network of autonomous paramilitary groups that arose in the United States the mid-1990s, and made contact with a militia group in Upstate New York. The group allowed us to film their training exercises and to visit their leader’s home, where they demonstrated various firing positions and formations.

We then worked with Cecil Slaughter, a choreographer in St. Louis, to create a dance performance based on our militia footage. We filmed two versions of the dance performance: one in a forest, and another on stage with lights, music and a video projection at the Mertz Dance Studio at Washington University.

For an exhibition at Optica Center for Contemporary Art in Montreal (Oct 20-Dec 1, 2012), we made a two-channel video installation that combines footage of the dance performances with the militia footage from which the performances are derived. See installation views below.

Similar two- and three-channel installations have been exhibitied at Momenta Art in Brooklyn (Jan 11-Feb 17, 2013) and at Vox Populi in Philadelphia (Jan 4-27, 2013).

Posse Comitatus will be exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from June 20 - September 8, 2013). This project will include both dance performance and video installation.

Posse Comitatus is a Latin term that means “force of the county.” Historically, the term has been used to refer to the common law authority of a county sheriff to summon a group of citizens (a “posse”) to enforce the law. In the context of the contemporary militia movement, it conveys to the idea that citizens have an inalienable right to defend themselves against tyranny, even if that means taking up arms against the state.

Militias proliferated in the United States following violent conflicts between federal agents and citizens in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993. The movement peaked in 1996, with 858 groups in 50 states, went into a period of decline, and regained momentum following the 2008 election of Barak Obama. The militia movement is not as ideologically homogeneous as one might assume; while some groups espouse white supremacy, others repudiate intolerance and welcome diversity. They are united by a suspicion of federal government, fear of a “New World Order,” nostalgic attachment to the American Revolution, and a fondness for guns and all things military.

The Daily Beast: "Tribe and Knight documented the activities of a survivalist paramilitary “club” in upstate New York, and also commissioned and taped a work of modern dance built around that footage. Videos of both are on view in the installation, where warfare and dance come off as surprisingly similar: They’re about rigor and training and craft, as well as the extreme artifice of rule-bound play. The guys tramping through snow in their camo are already involved in a dance, whether they know it or not. They might as well be in tutus."

- Blake Gopnik, "Dances of Death"