This article engages with North-American choreographer Trajal Harrell's interrogation of the relationship between performed histories, presents and futures. Working with the new materialist concept of diffraction, it examines how his choreographies engage with crucial questions surrounding racial politics and the construction of history, arguing that his works are performative and imaginative enactments of an ethical responsibility to rethink dominant cultural and historical discourses. Through an engagement with Harrell's Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series (2009-2017), a convergence is highlighted between his experimental performance practice and Donna Haraway's and Karen Barad's idea of diffraction as a method for recording and accounting for interferences, patterns of difference and entanglements of phenomena. The seven works of the series, identified by size from extra-small to extra-large, explore the idea of an imaginary encounter between New York's post-Cunningham choreographers and the voguing tradition in the early 1960s – the socio-historical impossibility of Harlem's black and Latino drag-ball scene meeting the predominantly white and middle-class world of the early postmodern dance of Judson Dance Theater. Through the lens of the new materialist notion of diffraction, which troubles the idea of the absolute separation of entities and illuminates their relationality, such impossibility can be entertained, as matter and discourse are seen as entangled and produced by shifting relations – of power, of bodies, of identities. Thus, a diffractive approach offers an ethico-epistemological model for the understanding of the material-discursive entanglement of seemingly opposing conditions. The article proposes that, in reimagining dance's past, Harrell's work diffracts temporalities, affirming and practising the possibility of other histories and of thinking history differently.

本文与北美编舞家特拉哈尔·哈雷尔（Trajal Harrell）对已执行的历史，现在和未来之间的关系的审讯有关。运用唯物主义的新衍射概念，他考察了他的编舞如何与围绕种族政治和历史建构的关键问题相联系，认为他的作品是对道德思想进行重新思考和反思的道德责任的表现力和想象力。通过与哈雷尔的《二十个神情》或《巴黎正在燃烧》在贾德森教堂系列中的参与（2009年至2017年），他的实验表演实践与Donna Haraway和Karen Barad的衍射作为记录和计算干扰，差异模式和现象纠缠的方法的思想之间的融合得到了强调。该系列的七部作品按大小从小到大的顺序进行了探讨，探讨了纽约后坎宁安编舞家与1960年代初的话语传统之间的假想相遇的想法–哈莱姆·布莱克的社会历史可能性和拉丁美洲人的拖球场景，满足了Judson Dance Theatre早期后现代舞蹈的主要白人和中产阶级世界。通过新的唯物主义衍射概念的镜头，它困扰了实体的绝对分离的概念并阐明了它们之间的关系，这样的可能性是可以接受的，因为物质和话语被认为是由权力，身体，身份等关系的转移而纠缠和产生的。因此，一种衍射方法为理解表面上对立条件的物质-递归纠缠提供了一种伦理学-流行病学模型。本文提出，在重新构想舞蹈的过去时，哈雷尔的作品会折射时间性，从而肯定和实践其他历史和思考历史的可能性。