Singing with spirits

On Saturday, February 22, 2020, I was joined by Okwui Okpokwasili and David Thomson in leading an opening ritual for Danspace Project's platform, Utterances from the Chorus, conceived and curated by Okwui and Judy Hussie-Taylor.

As the audience settled into seats in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery's parish hall, David and Okwui began to hum and vocalize as I read an invitation. It opened with a question derived from Okwui's exploration for the new platform which, regrettably, was interrupted and scrapped as the coronavirus pandemic shut our city down.

Here, I offer a new version of this invitation. As we now struggle with multiple traumas--the pandemic, the economic crisis, the murder of our Black kin--and dedicate our lives to justice, may you find this ritual healing, strengthening and motivating.

I invite you to perform it privately or in groups, as you find it useful.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(photo: D. Feller)

Okwui asked:

What does it mean to weave a collective song?


And so, let us ask:


What does it mean to weave a spirit song on Lenape land? 

What does it mean to sing with the African souls?


What does it mean to be guided?

What does it mean to be activated?


Today, charge this space with the energy of sound.


Seek and find your name inside your cells,

inside your veins,

inside your bones.


Sit or stand with the energy of your name circling inside you until you hear its song.


Bring that energy out into this space on the flow of breath and flow of melody.


What is your name?

Sing your name.

Sing your true name.


Find a melody that transports your name into this space.


Keep singing your name into the space.

You can get loud with it.

You can get soft.


You may pause if you’d like to rest,

and you may resume at any time.


You may raise your votive candle above your head at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


You may extend your votive candle in front of you at any time, and that gesture will mean whatever it wants to mean.


Feel and sing or chant the name of ancestors of your family blood or ancestors of your mind.


Find the melodies that transmit their names into this space--loud or soft.


Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.

Keep singing their names into this space.


Return at any time to the song of your own name.


Sing. Sing out.

Sing. Sing it out.

Keep singing.

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Your weekend must-see: Monk meets Waldman

Meredith Monk (left) and Anne Waldman
present their first collaboration.
(photo: Ian Douglas)

This week, Danspace Project hosts the first collaboration of two mages--Meredith Monk and Anne Waldman. That would be enough even without Pat Steir's paintings gushing fine, vibrant lines of vascular light from the altar wall. The evening--eighty minutes without intermission--is saturated by elemental sound, color, movement, intensity and mastery, crossing artificial barriers between word and body, song and image, human presence and the rest of nature.

Anne Waldman
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Waldman's opening set--Entanglement Variations, an incantation-in-progress--ensnares the listener. The spidery performer--part-rock star, part-downhome preacher, part-esoteric flimflam artist--stalks, distills, distorts and transmutes a motherload of words into fluid, musical sounds, clicking and hooting, gliding and hissing out her sticky, steely net. Monk, joined by ensemble members Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin and dancer Ellen Fisher, follows up with a five-song set including a work-in-progress, Cellular Songs, and makes the most of the sanctuary's warmth, dignity and sacred acoustics.

Meredith Monk
with Allison Sniffin (left) and Katie Geissinger (right),
members of Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Even without Fisher's expressive dancing (in Scared Song), it's possible to perceive the action of nerves, blood and breath inside Monk's vocal music. It feels sufficiently close to one's own internal moves and produces a near-immediate mirroring effect. Monk takes us wherever she likes, and the best of these journeys happens in between song (from impermanence), with its lyrics by Mieke van Hoek, her collaborator and companion, who passed in 2002. If there is anyone who can transport a listener, through sound, to that space "between the clouds and the night...between your hand and my hand...between the seed and the dirt," it is Meredith Monk.

Monk and Waldman
(photo: Ian Douglas)

The concluding set brings Monk and Waldman together in a juxtaposition of works and voices. The first piece--Wa-lie-oh/[Endangered] Living Thread--sounds forced, an unwieldy pattern, alternating Waldman's wilderness drift with Monk's more organized containment. But, once past that tentative beginning, they find a groove to share to the end of the night.

With sound by Ambrose Bye and lighting by Carol Mullins

Meredith Monk & Anne Waldman continues tonight and concludes  with Saturday's benefit performance for Danspace Project and The House Foundation for the Arts. As of last evening, tickets for Saturday were still available. Both evenings start at 8pm. For information, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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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.