Conversations Without Walls: From the Platform Archive: Okwui Okpokwasili and Reggie Wilson – Danspace Project
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Conversations Without Walls: From the Platform Archive: Okwui Okpokwasili and Reggie Wilson

Kristin Juarez (left) and Lydia Bell (right) smile and lean against each other on the front steps of St. Mark’s Church.
Kristin Juarez & Lydia Bell, 2018. Photo: Judy Hussie-Taylor.

Monday, June 14 | 5pm
Free. RSVP HERE
This CWW will take place online. A link will be sent to registrants approximately 30 minutes prior to the event.

Part of PLATFORM 2021: The Dream of the Audience

This CWW between Lydia Bell (creative producer, former Danspace Program Director) and Kristin Juarez (research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative, Getty Research Institute, past Danspace curatorial fellow) revisits Reggie Wilson’s Platform 2018: Dancing Platform, Praying Ground: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, which illuminated Wilson’s ongoing research into religion and race, and Okwui Okpokwasili and Judy Hussie-Taylor’s Platform 2020: Utterances From the Chorus, which explored collective song and the body as a site of resistance and transformation.

In two PLATFORM 2021 Conversations Without Walls, Danspace’s signature long-form conversation series, Bell and Juarez will convene virtually to activate the archives of past Platforms. 

View the program


Accessibility: CART live captioning will be provided for all film screenings and conversations. A phone number will be provided so that the Zoom chat may be accessed audibly. Requests, questions, or feedback can be submitted to seta@danspaceproject.org.

Lydia Bell is a Creative Producer based in New York City. She currently works with Leslie Parker Dance Project, Andrew Tay & Stephen Thompson, and Ni’Ja Whitson. From 2015-2020 she was Program Director at Danspace Project, where she collaborated with Judy Hussie-Taylor on programming, publications, and research initiatives. From 2009-2011, Lydia coordinated the three-year tour of the Eiko & Koma Retrospective Project in collaboration with 15 partner venues, including the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Lydia has worked on projects with Movement Research, Sam Miller/OAM Company, and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. She has contributed to publications such as Judson Now (Danspace Project, 2012), Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, and Movement Research Performance Journal and spoken nationally and internationally about her work. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A., Dance and Classics) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.

Kristin Juarez is the research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. in moving image studies from Georgia State University specializing in artists’ cinema. Her dissertation “Artistic Gestures: Choreography of the Artist’s Portrait Film” offers a sustained look at the ways visual artists engage choreography and blackness in moving image experiments. Her current collaborative research project focuses on the choreographer Blondell Cummings and will result in the first museum exhibition and book dedicated to the artist.

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