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Shacon Jones II is an artist-scholar-activist and doctoral candidate at Stanford University in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, with PhD minors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests focus on Black studies, masculinities and sexuality, dance studies, pleasure activism, and technologies of remembrance. Primarily interested in the Black male body in undervalued citizenship-making and life-sustaining practices, his dissertation Towards a Grammar of Aliveness: Black Masculinity, Radical Pleasure, & Critical Performance, employs ethnographic and visual methods to examine mundane and spectacular choreographies of Black men engaged in radical pleasure in the United States and abroad.

Shacon has worked off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop and New York Live Arts, and has trained at the Ailey School, Earl Mosley’s Institute for the Arts (EMIA), the British American Drama Academy (BADA), New Haven Ballet, and the Shanghai Theater Academy.

He holds a MA in Education from Stanford Graduate School of Education, an MFA in Theatre Management and Producing from Columbia University, and a BA in English and Drama & Dance from Morehouse College. A proud member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers Society, Shacon also holds a Consent-Forward Artist Certificate from Intimacy Directors & Choreographers, Inc., a Certificate in Leading Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion from Northwestern University, and a Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis from Stanford.

 

Welcome

Meditations of a Marked Man is a digital dance floor, a “work-in-progress” that interrogates the sexual commodification and deadly consequences of being a black man (still breathing) in America. Utilizing mixed media, found footage, and a variety of movement articulations, Meditations of a Marked Man, through the application of mimesis and glitching, specifically explores America's consumption, dismemberment, and desire for, and of, black male flesh.

In this meditative exploration, I center the personal. What I offer within this website are visual and sonic tremblings that explore the intersection of blackness and repetition, possession, death, flight, freedom, hunger, consumption, and the colonial gaze. What you will encounter is not an exhaustive account of my findings or interrogations, but rather a small conglomeration of ideas and experiments. While some of the meditations are beautiful, sensual, messy, alarming, funny, and unfinished, altogether, the work represents a pulsating and very much alive archive of embodied research and cathartic release.

I am attempting in this project to unpack my marked body by exploring the implications of the sexual and social death black men endure that often, if not always, precedes their physical death. What might it mean to keep breath inside black bodies? What might it mean to be free from sexual and predatory expectations or to reaffirm them in one's own liberation? How might one reclaim their body from the depths of social, political, sexual, and deadly captivity? And who is complicit (myself included)? These are the questions I am working through, and to which there are no easy answers. So, I invite you to peruse this website and explore a marked man's meditations. 

Trigger Warning: This work uses profanity and includes visuals depicting sexual acts, violence, and nudity.

 

**This site is a shortened archived version of the original production.**

**Production History **

Curated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Meditations of a Marked Man premiered as a part of the PhD qualifying exam series within the Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) at Stanford University. Funding for this work was generously provided by Stanford University and The Point Foundation. The process for creating Meditations of a Marked Man began on April 6, 2020, and concluded on March 5, 2021, with a successful defense via a viva voce with committee members.

**Production Acknowledgments **

Special thank you to Professor Michael Rau and Professor Samer Al-Saber for their advisement, ferocious administrative advocacy, and unwavering support in my undertaking of this creative exercise. Thank you to the production and marketing staff who met weekly with my cohort to support our projects and ideas. Huge shoutout to Daniel, Jane, Tony K, Tony S, and Kenny, who graciously supervised my creative time in the Elam Theater in the midst of a global pandemic. Thank you to Professor Amanda Reid for reinvigorating my movement praxis.Thank you to my cohort (Rashi, Michele, and Danielle), who are some of my biggest cheerleaders. And lastly, thank you to Jarvis Griggs, a colleague from Columbia University’s MFA program, who danced and performed in the work presented herein.