Platform 2024: A Delicate Ritual, guest curated by Kyle Abraham, is the 16th Platform to date at Danspace Project. The Platform presented six weeks of performances and events in Spring 2024, featuring shared evenings between Nicholas Ryan Gant & Shamel Pitts (May 2-4), David Roussève & taisha paggett (May 23-25), and Vinson Fraley & Bebe Miller (June 6-8). All of the performances responded to Abraham’s curatorial inquiries:

How does nature’s relationship with humanity communicate/jostle/live in your body?

How present is a history of love in your relationship to ritual or prayer?
 
How does change affect your relationship to ritual and prayer?

Platform 2024 honored the life and work of late choreographer and dance educator, Kevin Wynn. Other live events of the Platform included a memorial to Wynn, classes in Wynn’s technique taught by Jason Rodriguez, and an afternoon of Conversations Without Walls with Abigail DeVille, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Samora Pinderhughes, and Abraham. 

This online journal issue reflects on and engages with the shared evenings of the Platform with poetics  by Tara Aisha Willis, an essay by Sarah Cecilia Bukowski, a hypertext by Niall Jones, and a video excerpt of the musical performance by Nicholas Ryan Gant. All pieces are available in audio, visual, and text. 

Accompanying the Platform events and this online publication, is the Platform catalogue featuring images by photographer, Gioncarlo Valentine and a collection of transcribed and edited conversations between the Platform artists, along with unlikely “blind-date” conversations between choreographer, Beth Gill & photographer, Carrie Schneider; director, Charlotte Brathwaite & ecologist, Marisa Prefer; and arborist, Ethan Woods & acupuncturist, Steve Pang. With this publication, on the occasion of Platform 2024: A Delicate Ritual, Abraham brings together artists, environmentalists, and healers from different walks of life to reflect on their own rituals and to discuss overarching concepts of care, time, water, home, location, prayer and practice. The Platform Catalogue can be purchased here.