Saturday, March 7, 11am-4pm

All are welcome! Advance reservations are no longer available. Please join us on Saturday and we will try to accommodate everyone!

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This series of long form conversations unfolds over four Saturday afternoons during PLATFORM 2020: Utterances from the Chorus. They will allow for different ways to gather, talk, and share practice. Curators, artists, audience, writers, scholars, friends and family will take this slow time to process the lines of inquiry guiding the Platform to come together, across disciplines.

Scholar, Saidiya Hartman, multi-media artist, Simone Leigh, and Okwui Okpokwasili will open the day in conversation. The Voice & Body research group will follow in response, conducting an afternoon of shared practice. Research fellows include Jasmine Hearn, Tendayi Kuumba, Benedict Nguyen, Samita Sinha, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Asiya Wadud.

In 2018 Danspace Project Associate Curator Lydia Bell initiated collective terrain/s, a year-long  process into “sounding in the body” led by artists Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum with invited artists Tendayi Kuumba and Samita Sinha. In spring 2019, Danspace Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, invited these artists back alongside writers Asiya Wadud and Benedict Nguyen to form a Research Group, Voice and Body. With facilitation from Assistant Curator, Public Engagement, Seta Morton,  these Research Fellows have gathered threads of individual practice, shared research, and collective reading to weave a lexicon of words and a transmission of ideas that reverberate in sound, somatics, language, and narrative.

The Research Group has focused its work on acknowledging personal and cultural patterns of carrying, ancestral and trans-generational trauma, joy, weight, and sacrifice. They troubled institutional systems of pedagogy and the authority of the archive while placing a high value on embodiment as knowledge. Vibrational frequencies were shared as acts of deep care in resistance to violence. These artists asserted a radical insistence: how many ways are there to say the same thing and how can we say it again? In conversation with Okpokwasili, Hartman, and Leigh, the Fellows will guide us through a day of gestures and shared practices as we gather in community to build a collective song.

SCHEDULE
Please note: all times are approximate.

10:30am: Doors Open

11am: A Conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Simone Leigh, and Okwui Okpokwasili

12:15pm: A Response by Asiya Wadud

1pm: Voice & Body Research Group: An Afternoon of Shared Practice, Jasmine Hearn, Tendayi Kuumba, Benedict Nguyen, Samita Sinha, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Asiya Wadud

3pm: Reception

Accessibility: Danspace Project’s main entrance is wheelchair accessible via a ramp. The Parish Hall is accessible through the 11th street doors via one (8 inch high) step or a (28.5 inch wide) temporary ramp with assistance from our staff. Please request the use of the temporary ramp, ahead of the event date. All gender bathrooms are accessible via a stairway (24 steps that are all  7.5 inches high). A same-level, one stall restroom is available near Danspace Project’s main performance space in the church Sanctuary. The doorway of that bathroom is 33 inches wide. There is a small corridor to pass through when moving between the Sanctuary and Parish Hall, the narrowest corner of this corridor is 29 inches wide.

CART (Communication access real-time captioning) will be provided.

Part of PLATFORM 2020: Utterances from the Chorus