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Conversations Without Walls: Jasmine Hearn & Jo Stewart with Seta Morton – Danspace Project
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Conversations Without Walls: Jasmine Hearn & Jo Stewart with Seta Morton

October 29, 2020

Closed captions are available by clicking the “CC” button on the video. 

A PDF transcript of the conversation is linked here. 


This conversation was recorded on October 11, 2020 and first broadcasted on YouTube Live Saturday, October 24, 2020. This conversation is Presented in partnership with the Brown Arts Initiative at Brown University.

Choreographer and performer, Jasmine Hearn, joins poet and theater-maker, Jo Stewart, in a discussion that frames remembering as a practice of making and conjuring worlds. In this Conversation Without Walls (CWW), facilitated by Associate Curator, Public Engagement, Seta Morton, we find Hearn and Stewart during a shared residency hosted by Brown Arts Initiative at Brown University. The two artists discuss how each, in their own distinct bodies of work and in their ongoing collaborations, activate the double function of memory: to recall other realms-pasts-voices-spirit as well as “prepare community for the future.” This CWW features Hearn’s recent virtual performance, PLEASURE MEMORY and the poetic performance score written in response, “The Sky was Red” by Stewart. This CWW hinges on what it might mean to invent memory and to keep memory as these collaborators endeavor to record, score, and notate aliveness in performance for personal and institutional archives.


 

Included in this CWW 

 

Institutions on Indigenous Lands

  • Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church (New York, NY) is situated on the island of Mannahatta and more broadly in Lenapehoking, Lenape homeland
  • Brown University (Providence, RI) is situated on homelands of the Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples

 

Performance and Film Works

  • MEMORY KEEP(H)ER (completed in 2016), choreographed by Jasmine Hearn
  • PLEASURE MEMORY (2020), choreography and sound by Jasmine Hearn
    • Additional vocals by Kadie Henderson
    • Production assistance by Ani Javian 
    • Garment by Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency
  • Children of NAN: Mothership (completed in 2018), a film by Alisha B. Wormsley
  • you think you fancy (2019), choreographed by Jasmine Hearn
  • Fast Color (2018), a film directed by Julia Hart

 

Literary Works

  • “The archives need to breathe” (2020), an essay by Chanelle Adams
  • “The Sky was Red” (2020), a poetic performance score by Jo Stewart
  • Zong! (2008), a book by M. NourbeSe Philip

 

People

  • Renee Gladman, poet, novelist, essayist, and artist
  • Erica Hunt, poet, essayist, author, and Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts at Brown University
  • Myssi Robinson, multi-disciplinary artist
  • Jessie Young, choreographer, performer, and teacher
  • Jasmine Hearn’s family members:
    • Byronné Johnson Hearn and Donald Hearn
    • Claudette Nickens Johnson and Byron Johnson
    • Earnestine Todd and Charles Hearn

 

Events

  • Black Women as/and the Living Archive (2020), virtual Summer series presented by Washington Project for The Arts (WPADC) and curated by Tsedaye Makonnen

 

Jasmine Hearn is from the land of the Karankawa and Atapake people, now known as Houston, TX. A curator, director, choreographer, organizer, teaching artist, and a 2017 Bessie award winning performer, she is currently a company member with Urban Bush Women and a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Fellow. Jasmine also creatively collaborates with Alisha B. Wormsley, Vanessa German, Holly Bass, Jennifer Nagle Myers, and Solange Knowles.

Jo Elizabeth Stewart is a poet and theater maker. She uses a combination of gesture, voice, and text to make performance that investigates entrapment, borders, and freedom. Using poetic texts as a model, her performance works diverge from linear storytelling traditions. Poetic devices acquire concrete dimensions: em-dashes are rendered as barriers, enjambed lines as windows. From the architecture of each story emerges spaces of captivity and the possibility of freedom. She looks to the dead, unborn, flora, and animal life as guides and protagonists in these stories. By asking these beings to speak through her work, she strives to free them from objecthood, thereby freeing herself from objectification and offering the radical imagining of a borderless world. Jo was a recent member of Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, rehearsing and touring Cellular Songs from 2017-2019. Stewart is currently a cross-disciplinary MFA candidate in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

Tags: Conversations Without Walls, Jasmine Hearn, Jo Stewart, Seta Morton
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St. Mark’s Church
131 East 10th St.
New York, NY 10003
Phone (212) 674-8112
info@danspaceproject.org
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