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