Reggie Wilson has invited artists Keely Garfield, Same As Sister/Briana Brown-Tipley and Hilary Brown, and Ni’Ja Whitson to share new work in response to the Platform. Each evening will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

“What can be expressed is simple. What cannot be expressed is most urgent. What if there are no words yet for what we are living through? Meaning accrues — intonation, accumulation of speed, diminishing space, hate speech, embodied listening, sublime utterance — who are we now?” Keely Garfield Dance presents Mandala, performed by Emma Rose Brown,  Keely Garfield, Paul Hamilton, Raja Feather Kelly, Eleanor Smith, and guest artists.

Same As Sister/Briana Brown-Tipley and Hilary Brown‘s The Exciting Event…, a collaboration with performers Kristina Hay and Rahmus Rifical, musician/sound designer Lamy Istrefi Jr. and dramaturge Susan Mar Landau, explores the entwined identities and histories of slave and slaveholder as a site for compulsive reenactment. Inspired by slave narratives, fairytales, and the dual traditions of “Cakewalk” and minstrel performance, The Exciting Event… presents a fragmented narrative of race, gender and power. Drawing on multiple movement vocabularies, including Dancehall and Postmodern dance, the piece plays at the edge of the fictive and historical past and present, telling a tale that is both inconclusive and inevitable.

Ni’Ja Whitson presents Oba Qween Baba King Baba — Excerpt One, performed by theNWA Project (Kirsten Flores-Davis  and Ni’Ja Whitson) and guests. Oba is a Yorùbá word for ruler, a genderless term that has come to be known as king. Oba Qween Baba King Baba explores non-binary occupations of rulers, queering sites of the parade, politics, the parisol, the processional, and the pulpit, to reexamine the embodiment/roles of father and king. Informed by personal narratives of queer and trans children of preachers, and designed to be witnessed from above — the site/sight line of God or the Father or the Slave — Oba Qween Baba King Baba ritualizes an interrogation into dynamics between father, masculinity, and power.