Samita Sinha by Julia Discenza. Cecilia Vicuña by Jane England.

Conversations Without Walls: Samita Sinha & Cecilia Vicuña

Livestream: Saturday, October 10 at 12pm ET

YouTube link will also be sent to registrants on Saturday morning prior to the livestream, and will be posted on our website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@DanspaceProject)

Samita Sinha and Cecilia Vicuña are longtime friends with shared artistic and political sensibilities. Their conversation will be an improvised exchange acknowledging our current global crisis and pulling from their decades-long practices of improvisation, sound, song, healing, and poetics.

The CWW digital series are pre-recorded and will be streamed on YouTube and archived on the Danspace Project online Journal. More about Conversations Without Walls

Accessibility: This program will be captioned.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. The author of 25 art and poetry books, her works are included in museum collections such as the Tate London, MoMA New York, Guggenheim Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporaìneo de Chile, Museo de Arte de Lima, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago de Chile.

Samita Sinha is an artist and composer who synthesizes Hindustani classical and Bengali Baul folk vocal traditions and embodied energetic practices “to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation.” Sinha’s works have been commissioned by Asia Society, Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center, Danspace Project, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, Gibney Dance, and Onassis Foundation, and presented by The Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, PICA, National Sawdust, and others.

Photo by: AngieLMV Photography with edits by: UFlyMothership

Tendayi Kuumba & Greg Purnell, U.F.O: “The Mixtape,” A UFlyMothership Production

Official release: Wednesday, October 14th, 7pm ET.

STREAM THE SONGS ON SOUNDCLOUD NOW!

Dancer, singer, and songwriter, Tendayi Kuumba, and barber, visual artist, and music producer, Greg Purnell, are collaborators on an exciting new project entitled U.F.O: “The Mixtape.” This project is a collage of music, movement, images of current events, and futuristic projections.

The Mixtape was conceived by the duo as “a healing vibration for the time we’re in, presented in the form of an intergalactic radio show” with contributions from Courtney Cook, Jasmine Hearn, Angie Pittman, Samita Sinha, and Tatyana Tenenbaum, many of whom the duo have collaborated with in recent years at Danspace Project. They write, “This Mixtape is a vibe within a universal pause when we need it the most. A shoulder mountain to lean on, a zoom-verse with friends, a journey with sonic thoughts as the vehicle. A snapshot, a soundtrack, and call for new ways of healing beyond the moon.”

Earlier this summer, Danspace partnered with the Petronio Residency Center to host a week-long research residency where Kuumba and Purnell began creative development for UFO: “The Mixtape.”

Tendayi Kuumba made her Broadway debut in David Byrne’s acclaimed American Utopia, recently made into a film by Spike Lee, premiering on HBO October 17. She is a former member of Urban Bush Women and has toured her solo work in collaboration with musician Lenka Dusilova. She has also worked with Marjani Forté-Saunders, ASE Dance Theater Collective, & Axam Dance Theater Experience, Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born among many others. Greg Purnell is a Brooklyn-born and bred barber, visual artist, writer, music producer and “all around creative.” He has been featured in the 2015 BRIC Stoop Series Barbershop Stories: it’s all about hair and BRIC TV’s Brooklyn Made series. Other features include Afropunk, BAM, OkayAfrica and Nike collaborations, and I Don’t Camouflage by Aiko Tanaka. Together Kuumba and Purnell create music and performances as UFlyMothership, and co-founded the artistic lab, The Golden Ratio Project, in Brooklyn, NY.

U.F.O: "The Mixtape" was created, in part, with support from Danspace Project’s Commissioning Program and while in residence at Petronio Residency Center, which was a collaboration supported by the New York State DanceForce, a partnership program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. U.F.O: "The Mixtape" received additional support from the Jerome Foundation.

Photo: Daniela Martinez and Alejandro Arce.

Samita Sinha: Breathing Room

Open to all levels!

Wednesday, September 23, 10am-1pm ET (guest facilitator: Julia Ulehla) – Sign up here
Wednesday, October 21, 10am-1pm ET (guest facilitator: Julia Ulehla) – Sign up here
Wednesday, November 18, 10am-1pm ET (guest facilitator: Okwui Okpokwasili – Sign up here
Wednesday, December 16, 10am-1pm ET (guest facilitator: Cesar Alvarez) – Sign up here

A link will be sent to registrants in advance of each session.

Admission: Sliding scale of $0-$20 per session. Participants are invited to choose what to pay based on your circumstances. We ask that you be honest with yourself and your financial situation. You are welcome to attend for FREE if that makes the most sense for you.

The series will offer an accumulation of tools, knowledge, and pathways, however there is no requirement to attend all sessions.

“Breathing Room is a virtual space to reclaim life force. To open channels through voice and body. To come together, and be apart. To feel. To sense. To listen. To listen deeper, to be heard. To be naked. To be complicated. To be fragile. To rebel. To be sacred.” -Samita Sinha

In this series, artist and composer, Samita Sinha, will lead participants in vocal practice, followed by in-depth conversations with guest artists and participants. Sinha will teach energy threads, or miniature compositions, adapted from Indian vocal traditions. There will be space to work in shared solitude, as well as to sound together. “Embracing the medium of technology, we will play with making vibration-formations of our collective body through the process of listening and sounding,” writes Sinha.

Each month Sinha will be joined by a guest artist who will help facilitate reflection and conversation following the sonic travels. Guests include vocalist/composer, Julia Ulehla, artist/performer, Okwui Okpokwasili, and composer/performer, Cesar Alvarez.

Samita Sinha investigates origins of voice: quantum entanglement of listening and sounding, how voice emerges from body and consciousness, and how voice is claimed and rescued from voicelessness. She synthesizes Indian vocal traditions (Hindustani classical music and Bengali Baul tradition) and embodied energetic practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation.

Accessibility: Please email seta@danspaceproject.org to request CART live captioning or any other access requests. Requests should be submitted at least three weeks ahead of any one session.

Artist and composer Samita Sinha investigates origins of voice: quantum entanglement of listening and sounding, how voice emerges from body and consciousness, and how voice is claimed and rescued from voicelessness. She synthesizes training in Hindustani (North Indian) classical music, Bengali Baul tradition, and embodied energetic practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation.

Sinha’s sound and performance works have been commissioned by Asia Society, Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Queens Museum, and Gibney Dance, and presented by The Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, PICA, National Sawdust and others. She has received awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, National Performance Network, New York State Council on the Arts and the Ucross/Alpert Residency Prize, and collaborated across disciplines with artists including Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Ralph Lemon, Sunny Jain and Grey Mcmurray, Fiona Templeton, Daria Fain, Julia Ulehla, Robert Ashley, Dani Restack, Sunil Bald, and Aki Onda. Sinha teaches voice through many channels—in addition to private lessons and workshops, she has in recent years taught at Princeton University, Swarthmore College, Movement Research, Rubin Museum, Centro Nacional de las Artes (CENART) in Mexico City, and New York Asian Women’s Center.

Jasmine Hearn by Hayim Herron. Jo Stewart by Jonathan Herrera Soto.

Conversations Without Walls: Jasmine Hearn & Jo Stewart

Livestream: Saturday, October 24 at 12pm ET

WATCH ON OUR JOURNAL HERE

YouTube link will be sent to registrants on Saturday morning prior to the livestream, and will be posted on our website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@DanspaceProject).

Choreographer and performer, Jasmine Hearn, joins poet and theater-maker, Jo Stewart, in a conversation that frames remembering as a practice of making and conjuring worlds. The two will 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 Conversation Without Walls, facilitated by Associate Curator, Public Engagement, Seta Morton, will hinge on what it might mean to invent memory and to keep memory, as the artists endeavor to record, score, and notate aliveness in performance for personal and institutional archives. Hearn will elaborate on their methodology of remembering and recording their work in a wide range of overlapping modalities, an approach they developed while in collaboration with their grandmother, Claudette Johnson. Stewart will discuss resisting the historic task of dance notation while writing a performance score in verse—a response to Hearn’s virtual work, Pleasure Memory, presented as part of the exhibition Black Women as/and the Living Archive curated by Tsedaye Makonnen. This Conversation Without Walls will find these artists during a shared residency hosted by Brown Arts Initiative at Brown University as they continue their embodied and collaborative research into the potential of memory and its twin, the archive.

The CWW digital series are pre-recorded and will be streamed on YouTube and archived on the Danspace Project online Journal. More about Conversations Without Walls

Accessibility: This program will be captioned.

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.