"Can you be black and not perform?" is the question ofThe Essentialisn't, a conceptual art installation with award-winning writer and performer Eisa Davis singing for her life in a tank of water, or at the piano in a pasture of hair. A transatlantic undrowning which moves from enslavement through the Harlem Renaissance into the diasporic present, the piece interrogates the racial imaginary with an embrace of interiority and innovation, making space for an uncommodified Black feminine practice of sovereignty and liberation.