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Conversations Without Walls: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko & Larissa Velez-Jackson – Danspace Project
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Conversations Without Walls: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko & Larissa Velez-Jackson

April 2, 2021

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

An accessible PDF transcript of the conversation is linked here.


 

This Conversation Without Walls (CWW) was recorded on Monday, March 15, 2021 and first broadcasted on YouTube on Friday, March 26, 2021.

In this CWW, performance artist & poet, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and choreographer, interdisciplinary artist & movement educator, Larissa Velez-Jackson, reconnect three months following their Fall 2020 Research Group Fellowship together at Danspace.

At a moment when the pandemic remains far from over, Jaamil and Larissa both find themselves leaning into kinship, intimacy, and rest as politics to devise theater, while de-centering liveness and stagecraft. They have been slowing down to embrace a different kind of artist’s hustle, one that uplifts healing, self-love and spirituality. Larissa and Jaamil discuss how these intentional shifts have become central to each artist’s personal “internal audit.” This CWW is facilitated by Danspace’s Program Director & Associate Curator Benjamin Akio Kimitch.


 

Included in this CWW

 

Creative, Somatic, and Spiritual Practices

  • Improvisational movement practices
  • Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy
  • Reiki

 

Collaborative Processes

  • Chameleon: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s current project, Chameleon, is a multimedia living digital art work that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the fatal intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in contemporary America.  www.jaamil.com
    • American Chameleon: The Living Installments (2.0)
    • Chameleon: A Biomythography
    • American Chameleon podcast 

 

  • Star Pû Method and Star Crap Method: Larissa Velez-Jackson’s improvisational performance methodology. “Star Crap Method” premiered in 2014,  at Chocolate Factory Theater, after three years of research both in the study and on stage. A demonstration of Star Crap Method was set in May 2018 on students of The New School’s Lang Contemporary Dance department. Since directly researching the concept of healing and body-energetic practice with LVJ Performance Co. members between 2018 and 2021, the name has been altered to Star Pû Method. This new work has been workshopped widely in NYC during this period of research and will premiere in 2021 at The Chocolate Factory Theater. www.larissavelez.com
    • “Star Crap Method Injury Edition: A place for healing”, Directed and conceived by Larissa Velez-Jackson,  Performed by Kris Seto and Larissa Velez-Jackson, Reiki session by Kris Seto, Sound design by Larissa Velez-Jackson. Movement Research Spring Festival 2017: Inside Out / Upside Down, C’Mon Everybody in Brooklyn, NY Thursday June 1, 2017. Curated by Laurie Berg, Monstah Black, and Amy Koshbin.
    • “Response time with help her out /take 357″ By Hilary Clark and Larissa Velez-Jackson. American Chameleons, Painted Bride Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, January, 2011. Curated by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko.

 

 

 

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American performance artist, poet, and curator originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2020 Artist Residency Award Recipient from the Wexner Center for the Arts, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2019 NPN Development Fund Awardee, a 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellow, 2018 NEFA NDP Production Grant recipient, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. His creative practice draws from Black study, queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. His most recent works American Chameleon: The Living Installments (2020), Séancers (2017) and the Bessie nominated #negrophobia (2015), have toured internationally appearing in major festivals including: Tanz im August (Berlin), Moving in November (Finland), Within Practice (Sweden),TakeMeSomewhere (UK), Brighton Festival (UK), Oslo Teaterfestival (Norway), and Zürich MOVES! (Switzerland) among others. He is the author of two chapbooks and his poems and essays have been included in The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Broad Street Review, among others. Visit jaamil.com for more information. IG: @jaamil_means_beauty

Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ) is a NYC-based choreographer, movement educator and multi-platform artist who uses improvisation as a tool for research and creation; blending dance, healing modalities, sound, internet art, humor and strategies of self-compassion in her original performance practice called Star Pû Method (a.k.a. Star Crap Method). She has presented work at numerous NYC venues such as: American Realness Festival ’11 and ‘15 at Abrons Arts Center, Chocolate Factory Theater ‘14 and in 2017 at New York Live Arts with Yackez, a collaboration with her husband, Jon Velez-Jackson. Called “an adroit physical comedian” who “seems to be questioning entrenched conventions of contemporary performance” in The New York Times, LVJ was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grant to Artists, in 2016. www.larissavelez.com

Tags: Conversations Without Walls, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Research Groups
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