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The Pew (2023)

 “The Pew” both use ritual, resistance, and desire as catalysts for locating the catharsis of grief between, in, and through the body. The Pew, religious in nature, stages the black body as a site for resistance, regeneration, and reconstruction by mobilising the intertextual residue left behind by/in Talley Beatty's “The Mourners Bench” (1947). By investigating his own spiritual background and that of other black queer people, Mcmillan created an autobiographical performance inspired by the embodiment of spiritual release that one can find in black religiosity and the evangelical church. The work envokes both presence and absence through the use of spirit in the bodily archive.  
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The Long Way Home (2021)

“The Long Way Home,” poses a way of contending with the Black body as a composite body, one that is connected to, affirms, and disrupts the archive and Historiography. Through this solo dance performance, McMillan tracks the Merce Cunningham technique through diaspora, emphasizing that the diaspora is never the homeland: it’s never home, it’s always somehow both exile in migration and in travel; different from, yet somehow always in dialogue with, its genesis.
Director / Videographer: Eryka Dellenbach

The Mirror /The Reaping (2019)


​​The Reaping 4.6 (2020) is a new installation made for the gallery/museum space. This work will use formality, abstraction, and chance procedures as a conduit in which to explore and interrogate white supremacy. The installation’s scenography will be sourced from interviews with a white supremacist, viral videos of college fraternities chanting racist epithets and common stereotypes of people of color. This work will use gesture story and movement to make both blackness and white supremacy visible through the use of radical juxtaposition.
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​Projected viral videos of racist fraternity chants and white supremacist riots will frame the space and movement sequencing. Formal choreography and slippages of Africanist movement will create a mirror of whiteness, which is composed of the next generation and the viral videos.

Elegy For Mary Turner (2017-2018)

Dawn Harbor, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams and Christopher- Rasheem McMillan explore the horrible story of Mary Turner’s murder through art, dance, and spoken word on the stage of the Englert Theater. This story is pivotal in the larger history of lynching and racial violence​ in our country.

Black Lokes (2017)


Black Lōkəs (2017) is an experimental reconstruction and response to American choreographer Trisha Brown’s work Locus (1975). This work uses Trisha Brown’s methodology for making Locus (1975), a work on the border between visual art and performance art, as a way of creating movement material based on cultural positionality through the use of geometric space. Locus (1975) followed a diagrammatic score: a cube organised around numerical points, each correlating to one of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Located at the center of the cube, a twenty-seventh point designated the space between letters.
Black Lōkəs (2017) departs from this iconic work
by using chance scores based on the victims of police violence as people in space, departing from Brown’s alphabet structure. The work will use biographical material for the structure, thus signifying Identity while investigating a choreographic structure through visual arts practice. Is it possible to look at moving bodies in distress both as a site for cultural commentary and as an artistic expression?

Resistance, Resilience, and
Restoration (2018)


Resistance, Resilience, Restoration project. We will explore the speech of African American resistance in our culture, using my custom motion-sensor dance system which will abstract words into musical tones over time. 

The key to innovation is taking existing resources and using them in new ways. This project and its technology fit this description precisely. The individual components are well-established - motion-sensors, MIDI communication, and synthesizers - however the configuration with a dance performance is a unique opportunity for University of Iowa to participate in the forefront of interactive art and technology. 

 Cupcakes and Confessions (2011)


​Cupcakes and Confessions explores Confession as an autobiographic/ autho-ehtnograpahic tool for both understanding Truth vs truth(s) and the oral presentation of personal narratives. This work explores the coming out process and gender non conformity through found and experienced life stories.

Barely Absent (2014/2018)

Choreography: Cathy Nicoli
Restaged: Christopher-Rasheem Mcmillan 

The original work "can't recall the title" (2006) was much better that this. My former dance professor and mentor made a work that was so profound that I could not get it out of my mind. I could only remember two gestures from that dance, so I recreated a new work and incorporated the two gestures that I could remember. She did not authorise me to do this, but I am drawn to her work.