Knowles has also carved out space for her lyrics to be experienced beyond their aural effect. In works like “Seventy States,” a digital homage to the trailblazing black feminist artist Betye Saar commissioned by the Tate Museum in London in 2017, and the lyric book she released (also titled A Seat at the Table), Knowles employs text and image to give her lyrics a sculptural quality. The book reworks lines from the album’s songs into black geometric shapes set in white space, a practice suggestive of Glenn Ligon’s use of repeated phrases in works like his seminal 1990 painting “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background).” (The piece borrows the line from writer Zora Neale Hurston’s celebrated 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”) Knowles’s own lines appear poetically arranged on the page, printed repeatedly to amplify the weight of her words.
It isn't just that it's "knee" bends as it "steps" forward: It's that you can also see her "hands."
To give you an idea of what I see/sense when I look at this: Here's Gramaw.
Now. I don't want to stir up anymore "Native American Legend = Dead Man Walking Tornado" misinformation. I will say many native cultures believe that storms are intelligent "Entities" of some sort that can be spoken with and reasoned with. Some don't believe the same. Many believe there are spirits in the sky and that storms are either part of that spirit, a spirit of its own, or are caused by a spirit (such as Red Horse or Thunder Spirits / Frog Medicine.) And some natives even do believe that "If you see a man in a tornado you are about to die" because they were taught as much, but taught so after someone with authority came into contact with that misinformation and co-opted it.
But to believe there are spirits, entities, beings, or even "man" in the clouds/in the sky/inside storms/inside twisters, is not a set of beliefs that are totally outside of the scope of all native belief systems.
I for one think if you *sense* an entity in a storm, you should take cover. If it feels like the storm is watching you, if you get that eerie feeling, just get underground. Even if you don’t believe in spirits or supernatural things, understand that That feeling is produced by neurochemicals, and those neurochemicals had about a billion more years of "experience" with surviving natural selection at any point. So listen to that feeling, because the ancient people that didn't develop that neurochemical reaction to bad storms probably didn't survive and reproduce like your ancestors did. Trust your neurons.
Part of a larger series- Edited Jalynne Dutton video clips also shown at link below.