Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Rizvana Bradley.
Chameleon is a multi-tiered, multimedia performance project by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people within the American context. Using complexity theory—the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a choreographic device, this work explores how minoritarian communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests that archive personal, freedom narratives as a way to subvert culturally charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American poet, curator, and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2017 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2017 Jerome Artists in Residence at Abrons Arts Center, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. He lectures, speaks, and performs internationally. His previous work #negrophobia was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and has toured throughout Europe having appeared in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), TakeMeSomewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), Zurich MOVES! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich), among others. He is a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); 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 where he earned his MA in Curatorial Studies.
This open studio showing of Chameleon will be performed by movement vocalist mayfield brooks with sound and performance artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.
This showing of Chameleon was supported in part by a commission from New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency program with additional support from the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Council Member Corey Johnson, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Shubert Foundation.
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and African-American Studies at Yale. She holds a BA from Williams College and a Ph.D. from Duke University, and she was a Helena Rubinstein fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bradley’s research and teaching focus on the study of film and media at the intersections of literature, poetry, contemporary art, and performance. Her scholarly approach to artistic practices in the fields of African-American cultural production, as well as the wider black diaspora expands and develops frameworks for thinking across these contexts, specifically in relation to global and transnational artistic and cinematic practices. Bradley is currently at work on two new scholarly book projects, and has published articles in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory; TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Black Camera: An International Film Journal.
Upcoming
October 9-14: Within Practice, Stockholm, Sweden
October 17-20: Screening of White State I Black Mind and in-process showing of Chameleon at the LAX Festival, Los Angeles, CA
November 9-10: Séancers at Sophiensaele, Berlin
December 3-10: Séancers at the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
