Defending the Black dead: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko at Abrons

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko in Séancers,
a world premiere at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Amanda Jensen)

(photo: Erik Carter)

Séancers has landed at Abrons Arts Center like something to gladden the hearts of Sun Ra...and Fela...and Toni Morrison. An audacious, extravagant, overstuffed masquerade enclosing--and sometimes exposing--a gentle, vulnerable core. Jaamil Olawale Kosoko starts off almost backing into the space and backing into performing, gingerly, tentatively talking his way into the thick of things with help, on the night I attended, from a brief exchange with Autumn Knight, another interdisciplinary artist. Each night, Kosoko engages a different companion and wayshower. He calls these helpers Special Guest Séancers.

He appears to meander, physically, verbally, like a warm-up, a figuring out, a taking of temperatures--the room, his own--a way to let his ancestral spirits know he's ready to be inhabited. He fumbles a little, trying to recall exact scripture from bell hooks and James Baldwin; notes that part of his opening represents an homage to Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres; ambushes us with poet Audre Lorde's searing, furious "Power."

Abrons's Experimental Theater, from the top audience row (where composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste generates swoony, enveloping weather) to the far wall of the space, is splashed with all manner of glittery and quaint stuff I can't even begin to inventory--from silver-wrapped Hershey's kisses to rippling, gleaming sheets of golden Mylar and everything in between.

The tiny-fonted program notes include a long, long, long list of members of the creative and production team including a dramaturg, "performance doulas," and the "Special Guest Séancers," a statement about Séancers, a further, and longer, "STATEMENT ABOUT THE WORK" by Kosoko, and a full-paged, three-columned, footnoted, intriguing and quite comprehensive essay about the work by acclaimed dance scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild. All of it quite hard to get much into with typical low lighting and the pre-show chatter of people around you. Read it--carefully--at home. It is its own work of art.

This massive documentation--which, frankly, leaves me to think, "What's left to say?"--is likely strategic, a necessary shot across the bow of any presumptuous critic looking to clamp nasty, dirty paws all over an artist's bright new efforts. It says, "I'll document my work myself, thank you very much!" I sympathize--believe me, I do--but I also had to take all of this and lay it to the side.

There is also this, from promotional text for Séancers:

Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is a nonlinear examination of how the American racialized body uses psychic, spiritual, and theoretical strategies to shapeshift through socio-politically charged fields of loss and oppression.

... collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection and paranormal activity. Interrogating issues related to American history and coloniality, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of the Black imagination to traverse the “fatal” axis of abstraction, illegibility and gender complexity.

So...everything. Everything. Also laid aside...to make room for me to see what I could see.

The work--this apparition, hallucination, ritual container for all of the above--is only 65 minutes. In that time, I saw a man capable of wearing sweetness and bewilderment as easily as he wore jet black fake eyelashes and exquisite costumes sending two inseparable messages--the bold and the delicate. I saw a spirit land as Kosoko's arms and writhing body swished streamers of golden Mylar. I heard him intone the words "get lost" several times like a mantra...or a directive...or, a simple plea. I heard words about trying, about getting tired. I saw the armor of oversized glasses and bespangled bodysuits. And I saw the letting go...of costumes, of coverings. The shedding and sloughing off. The retracing of steps, away from the crossroads, back up the stairway, into piercing light.

Séancers continues through Saturday, December 9 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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TONY review: afroFUTUREqu##r

Hey, gang! I reviewed the Friday program of afroFUTUREqu##r (curated by Thomas DeFrantz and niv Acosta) at JACK for Time Out New York, and TONY had a delay in posting it. But you can find it now at this link.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko: #negrophobia in brief

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
(photo: Scott Shaw)

I like the odd little Studio A at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. You know, that room, right off the Gibney lobby, that you mostly ignore as you sign in with the guard and climb the stairs. It's 15 x 30 (got that off the Gibney Web site), suitable for, say, a sleepover with a small bunch of girlfriends. It's also the space of choice for Nigerian-American performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, presenting his new work, #negrophobia as part of Gibney's Fall 2015 Making Space season.

The experience of being physically drawn inside a work of art, and one that's alive with change, cannot be called new. But there are times when it seems particularly apropos. #negrophobia qualifies.

Studio A, transformed by Kosoko, looks like a Pinterest board. Prints of photos snake along the floor. Looking around, I recognize, for instance, James Baldwin, Forest Whitaker, an arrested Tiger Woods. Iconic books like The Bluest Eye and PUSH take talismanic places of honor. Mounds of tangled celluloid stand in, I suspect, for the murky history of Hollywood's relationship to the Black body and Black talent. On one table rests a memorial card for Kosoko's deceased brother. (There's a story there, which I don't know, but Kosoko will later show us "my dead brother's shoes" and we will hear clink of chains running through his hands.) A lithe, incredibly model-slender dancer (Kentrell/IMMA MESS), wearing only a cloth mask, blonde wig and tomato-red thong, slinks and slithers around taking selfies and live video, sometimes interacting closely with the bling-spangled Kosoko. One wall features video projections, and music pumps through the space. Kosoko is a little bit Olivia Newton-John ("Magic") and a little bit Seal ("Crazy").

The audience can sit on slick white floor runners, stand on the sidelines or, within considerable limits, move around to view things from different angles. What we cannot do is leave.

There's one door, and it's largely--I sense, deliberately--obstructed by Kosoko's stool and microphone and Afrofuturistically golden being. Tiny Studio A becomes all about airless confinement, blockage and, through the Kosoko's text, the toxic detritus of other people's sick thinking about the Black body, specifically Black masculinity.

God, I wanted a Cosby Show life, and you gave me a reality show life.

You ain't shit...You ain't even gonna be shit.... From the moment you're out of your mama's womb, you are being told [this]. What does this do to childhood? How do you build your dream? I'm obsessed with this question.... How do you push against this to realize yourself?

Kosoko points and picks at the source of this devastation, although I do not think he disrupts it much in #negrophobia. That may be impossible, and fruitlessness might be the point. But as I looked around the room, I wondered if even the young white people in attendance--clued-in at least enough to go to something called #negrophobia--found anything here unfamiliar enough to be urgent, eye-opening news.

One interesting feature is the ending that isn't. Kosoko gets to a point where it looks as if he has completely lost it and wants to throw in the towel. Over and over, he seems to dismiss us: "It's over. You can go now." He insists, wearily and somewhat testily. "You can go home to your Manhattan apartments. You don't have to watch it anymore."

Not a single person moves, because you can't really, and you can see this is just the exhaustion talking. The exhaustion of breathing in decades of toxic fumes and struggling to stand. Besides, there's some more costume foolery up ahead to watch and now--possibly forever--a perky KKK song to listen to. As Yogi Berra would have said, "It ain't over 'til it's over." And it ain't.

Nightly through Saturday, September 26, at 7:30pm* with limited ticketing. Friday night's performance will be followed by a discussion with George Sanchez. For information and tickets, click here.

*UPDATE: A show has been added for Saturday at 5pm, but hurry!

Learn more about Jaamil Olawale Kosoko|anonymous bodies here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (entrance: 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

for Jaamil/Jeremiah....

Reflecting on

Perspectives on Black Male Revisited:

Black Masculinity, Illegibility, Materiality, Constructs, Creative Space

& Imaginative Experience

curated by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

last evening at 

Gibney Dance Center's

Sorry I Missed Your Show

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
producer, curator, poet and performance artist
(bottom photo courtesy of Kelly Strayhorn Theater)

Brother of Names and Spirits, I am
not sorry.
I did not miss your show.
I saw your show.
And I see your show.

And I see their show.
Black flesh pressed against concrete.
Holes, from arm to eye, inked black
on this white chart, entry points and exits.

They see animals, their dumb property, commodities.
Let us merge with earth, strong and vulnerable, and
with animals, raising sacred animal powers in images
of magickal readjustment.

And, yes: your Geranium Essential.
What place does healing oil have
in a National Conversation On Race?
It has the place of pleasure.

Pleasure exists in truth, banner flowing
over neighborhoods and continents.
Hold it not tightly.

Please
let it take breeze, currents, sun.
It is pleasure, after all. Or...what is it?
It is Trickster, indefinable
Trickster
of Names Shapes Faces
with amplitude, yes, even enough
for "wading, wading."

You ask us to prophesy
"an infinite space
of limitless creativity,
empowerment,
safety,
and
evolution."

This needs safe space for a sister's tears
--and yours. Let our bodies cry.

Let this conversation open when
and where we enter:

Where do we find pleasure? And where,
a shout for joy?

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

*****

Here, for your consideration, are three questions offered by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko during last evening's Sorry I Missed Your Show:

How do we redirect/reimagine sources of trauma as sources of pleasure, healing, freedom and modes of creative thought and/or experience?

What is your relationship to Blackness in terms of identity, representation, and gender politics, and in what ways are you considering this position into the future?

How do we institute new pathways of thinking where illegible and/or complex queer and black bodies do not become continual platforms of colonized rage.

Image to movement: Kosoko's "Black Male Revisited" at Danspace Project

Whitney V. Hunter
(photo by Sylvain Guenot)

The challenge of representing and questioning the image of the black male is great. Black masculinity suffers not just from overrepresentation, but oversimplification, demonization, and (at times) utter incomprehension.

I wanted to produce a project that would examine the black male body as body and political icon.

--Thelma Golden, curator, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum of Art, 1994

Our challenge...is how to widen the conversation within the aesthetic, again."

--Greg Tate, Danspace Project Conversations Without Walls panel on "Revisiting Black Male Today: A Look 20 Years Later"

I'm revisiting the catalogue I bought in 1994 at the Whitney's multi-media Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art show. Its dramatically matte-black card cover contains and confines a multitude: "pretty" Muhammad Ali in his prime, white towel slung over his perfect, gleaming chest; Emmett Till, dead, his ruined face for all to see in that open coffin; an anonymous slab of muscular thighs and genitals, courtesy of Robert Mapplethorpe; a homeless man revealed as if by Rembrandt's light; O.J. Simpson awaiting judgment; King and Malcolm clasping hands while gazing anywhere but at each other.

Each time I lift this book, I'm surprised anew by its heft and its stiff, awkward, locked-in feel; the small type of its text hinting at how very much there is to say and all that is still not said.

In its time, Black Male triggered confusion and strong objections. Some in the Black community felt that curator Thelma Golden's choices--including works by artists who were not Black, not male or not heterosexual--dangerously reinforced racist stereotypes. Others thought that the Whitney's first Black curator had missed a significant opportunity, that the show was not extreme enough to be truly subversive. When Golden later brought Black Male to Los Angeles (UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center), community groups mounted alternative exhibitions devoted to imagery they considered more representative and positive.

Now, twenty years on, performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko has taken Thelma Golden's controversial project as a springboard for his own inquiry into Black masculinity. For Danspace Project, Kosoko curated a three-evening, multi-genre program, Black Male Revisited: experimental representations through the ephemeral form, "incorporat[ing] voices from trans and queer artist communities and situat[ing] their work inside an experimental dance context."

I attended two of Kosoko's Saturday afternoon panels where most of the panelists admitted only tenuous, if any, personal experience with the 1994 exhibition. But in the era of Obama and racist backlash, of stop-and-frisk, of obsession with what's on--not in--Dante de Blasio's head, and when a Black man might become the NFL's first openly gay active player, there remains good reason for new generations to explore the images and meanings of Black masculinity in American society. The Black-Dominican transgender performer niv Acosta--whose recent piece, i shot denzel, I reviewed here--is an interesting example. [Listen to Acosta, introduced by panel moderator Thomas Lax, here.]

On Friday evening, I attended a performance featuring solo turns by Rafael Sanchez, i n d e e, Whitney V. Hunter and IMMA/MESS (Jarrod Kentrell).

Taking a portion of space in Peter Stuyvesant's sanctuary, Rafael Sanchez (Con-Sume me/Con-Sume You) constructed a contrarian altar, setting before us a protective clear plastic drop cloth and a variety of kitchen aids and produce.

Splatter of sliced and puréed produce. Mess of hypersexual hip hop. Burlesque of feral masturbation of butter- and chocolate-smeared cucumbers. I'll see you, Karen Finley, and raise you....

Time and again, a frenzied Sanchez took a machete to his own fake phallus, replaced the slippery prosthesis and set about massaging or mangling it again. Blending a potion of green-tinged phallic juice, he poured it into a bottle shaped like a crystal skull and offered it. Some audience members willingly raised this elixir to their lips.

The wide, vaulting space of St. Mark's Church seemed hushed, untouched, drawn back, like a pearl-grey hem, from the riot of sound and action. And when Sanchez was done, how quickly, how efficiently every trace of was whisked up in the plastic and carted away. A sense of I'm throwing the worst of it in your face followed closely by That never happened. Just how much force does it take to make change? St. Mark's Church floor--held sacred by Christians and dancers alike--was once again empty, spotless.

The performer i n d e e describes themselves as "a queer evolutionary transmasculine multi-gendered femme" who investigates "non-normative gender expressions found amongst black females in the performance realm." In the concise Oh MiMi My, they shed clothes and spin/wrap/firmly bind their entire torso in cling film--plastic containment again--before donning high heel boots and a wig and launching a lipsync and dance routine.

Whitney V. Hunter, entering the space in D.R.O.M.P., could be any guy on his way to do manual labor. He's dressed in pristine white coveralls and carries a white bucket and a big roll of white paper under one arm. In short order though, he approaches a mic and addresses his onlookers. With a warm smile, he tells us "don't be shy; don't be embarrassed" if we're called upon to give him a hand.

A voice recites single words, one by one--cool, strong, vulnerable, independent, well-spoken, restrained, sexual, reflective--and Hunter becomes its scribe, unrolling a stretch of paper and laying one end of it over his body. As he scribbles each word on the paper's surface, he slides sideways beneath it. The rustling paper accepts these words that, otherwise, might be projected upon his Black body. He controls the paper, cutting and, if necessary, ripping it into sections. But why do this alone? In a playful spirit, he races towards the audience, pulling up a group of folks to help speed the work.

Like i n d e e and Sanchez, Hunter finds that sweet spot where confinement gives way to possibility. Those coveralls, it turns out, conceal gold-spangled bikini briefs and some inexplicable plastic patches stuck to his bare skin. He spins in joy as his "assistants" make a hash of the torn, crumpled paper. (D.R.O.M.P. stands for "Don't Rain on My Parade," the song heard on his soundtrack.) In his exuberant resistance, all of those labels--cool, strong, well-spoken, restrained--become liberated and fluid, disposable or recyclable, at his will.

Hunter scoops up every shred of paper to stuff inside his discarded coveralls. This belongs to you, I imagine him thinking. Here, you take it! The white cloth swells to receive the paper and takes the shape of a body, not so much a person as a man of straw, and I envision that straw man burning.

Finally, Hunter carefully feels around his legs, shoulders and back for the mysterious patches. Monitor patches, perhaps? Whatever they are, he makes sure to peel each and every one of them from his body.

Imma/Mess (Jarrod Kentrell)
(photo courtesy of the artist)

In Ordinary Love, which closed the program, Jarrod Kentrell (aka Imma/Mess) worked within a rectangular box of light (shades of Sanchez restricted to his rectangular, plastic altar). He werked Beyoncé's "Haunted" (All the shit I do is boring, all these record labels boring/I don't trust these record labels, I'm torn/All these people on the planet working 9 to 5 just to stay alive) with his real face obscured and with super-pliable and spastic movement.

Performance creates a space of transparency and focus, a space of ritual, which is about doing the work that makes a future possible. Of these four rituals, Hunter's D.R.O.M.P. offered me the clearest sense of forward movement--of breaking out and going somewhere of one's own choosing.

Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art is closed. For information on upcoming Danspace Project programs, click here.

Artists and vulnerability: Mixing it up with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
(photo courtesy of Kelly Strayhorn Theater)

ClassClassClass 

presents

Preparing The Vulnerable Body

 for Performance

a workshop with 

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Sunday, Feb 16, 1-4pm

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan

(directions)

Part performance theory, part vocalization, part group movement/thinking exploration, students will investigate themes of trans performance states, sensitivity, risk-taking, eroticism, exhibitionism, bad behavior, and vocal sounding as a means of healing the self through live performance. Together we watch and support each other by finding, exposing, and attempting to break open previously locked/hidden pathways of emotional, physical and visual performativity. Students are encouraged to bring props and costumes to the workshop to which they have personal meanings, but are willing to let be destroyed.

Kosoko with composer-musician Pauline Oliveros
(photo courtesy of Jaamil Olawale Kosoko)

Kosoko talked with me about his three-hour workshop, Preparing The Vulnerable Body for Performance, open to performing artists from a multitude of genres:

"My idea is to encourage a kind of desegregation in the classroom, to encourage a variety of different kinds of artists to occupy the same space and to learn from each other. So often, we encourage a more insular approach to the creative process and creative space-making. It’s super-important to give those of us who want to branch out of that and explore the terrain an opportunity to engage and meet and explore this idea of vulnerability with others who are working in a similar way but maybe not in the same genre, and use it as a platform to give and take in that way. 

"I also want to think about incorporating a variety of theory into the workshop, bringing in poets, music, maybe some text that I’ve been thinking a lot about--I really love the work of Daphne Brooks--author of Bodies in Dissent--and other literature that I plan to use as jumping off points to initiate certain creative spontaneity. That’s what I’m super-excited about. And then just to see who all comes and what we can share with each other and to create a safe space for that exploration to take place.

"In addition, I’ve been working a lot with Pauline Oliveros over the past year, here in Philadelphia, a legend in the sounding, experimental music, vocalization world. So, using various tactics that I have accumulated over the past ten years of my professional career, I’d love to share some of these methods and ideologies that I’ve learned as a part of my own practice for preparing my body for doing the kind of work that I do and present on the stage."

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a producer, curator, poet, and performance artist. He is a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University.

Rooted in a creative mission to push history forward, Kosoko’s work in theater and dance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. His new solo performance work entitled BLACK MALE REVISITED: Revenge of the New Negro premiered in December 2013 at Miami Theater Center as part of Art Basel and Art Miami '13. As a performer, Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, Headlong Dance Theater, and others. Kosoko’s poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo, among other publications. In 2011, Kosoko published Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). He is a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC). Visit: www.jaamil.com for more information.

*****

In February, CLASSCLASSCLASS will also present affordable workshops by iele paloumpis (see my interview with them on Dancer's Turn), Aretha Aoki, Nia Love and Jillian Sweeney, among many other artists, at Abrons Arts Center. Click here to learn more.