“Obligations” is a manifesto for staying alive. This video documents three rituals of endurance performed by artist, Jax Neal. The artist is met with the obstacles of water, weight and impact. As Neal faces each obstacle, he must discover what will inspire the courage to keep going. These tasks are metaphors for the larger obstacles of our lives. Hope in these instances is not a wish for struggle to disappear on its own accord, but the courage to consider one’s own soul as a power of equal magnitude. For Neal hope is in the act of moving itself. It is not the wish to move, the wish to reach one’s destination. It is the courage to move knowing that destination May never be reached, that it may not exist at all. It is the muscular propulsion toward the unknown. 
  
  

OBLIGATIONS

ALTARCATION I is an endurance rite performed by artist, Jax Neal alongside his own mother, Shaelyn Neal. In this work mother and son discuss family, personhood, and the work of loving one another, all while Neal runs on a commercial grade treadmill. In a final test of fortitude Neal runs for two minutes straight at thirteen miles an hour, directly toward his own mother. Neal is asking the question, "how hard will you work for the love that you deserve?"

  
ALTARCATION I debuted at the sixteenth annual Line Breaks Hip Hop Theater Festival, hosted by OMAI First Wave at the Wisconsin Union Theater. OMAI First Wave is the only full tuition scholarship program for Hip Hop and Urban Arts in the world, located at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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Jax Neal