Conversations Without Walls: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and Larissa Velez-Jackson
This conversation will take place on YouTube. A link to view the conversation will be sent to registrants via email 30 minutes prior to the stream.
In Fall 2020, Danspace Project invited six Artist Research Fellows, devynn emory, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, iele paloumpis, Angie Pittman, and Alice Sheppard to gather virtually with Danspace’s curatorial team. They responded to Danspace’s digital programming, the shifting landscape of dance, making and presenting, pedagogy, and programming. These sprawling and intimate conversations led to critical reflection, dreaming, and deep connection. Each of the Artist Research Fellows will return in our Winter 2021 digital Conversations Without Walls (CWW) series
In this CWW, performance artist & poet, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and choreographer, interdisciplinary artist & movement educator, Larissa Velez-Jackson, reconnect to continue threads of reflection and dreaming. At a moment when the pandemic remains far from over, Jaamil and Larissa both find themselves leaning into kinship, intimacy and rest as politics to devise theater, while de-centering liveness and stagecraft. They have been slowing down to embrace a different kind of artist’s hustle, one that uplifts healing, self-love and spirituality. Larissa and Jaamil discuss how these intentional shifts have become central to each artist’s personal “internal audit.” This CWW will be facilitated by Danspace’s Program Director & Associate Curator Benjamin Akio Kimitch.
The CWW digital series are pre-recorded and will be streamed on YouTube and archived on Danspace Project’s online Journal at danspaceproject.org/journal.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American performance artist, poet, and curator originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2020 Artist Residency Award Recipient from the Wexner Center for the Arts, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2019 NPN Development Fund Awardee, a 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellow, 2018 NEFA NDP Production Grant recipient, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. His creative practice draws from Black study, queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. His most recent works American Chameleon: The Living Installments (2020), Séancers (2017) and the Bessie nominated #negrophobia (2015), have toured internationally appearing in major festivals including: Tanz im August (Berlin), Moving in November (Finland), Within Practice (Sweden),TakeMeSomewhere (UK), Brighton Festival (UK), Oslo Teaterfestival (Norway), and Zürich MOVES! (Switzerland) among others. He is the author of two chapbooks and his poems and essays have been included in The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Broad Street Review, among others. Visit jaamil.com for more information. IG: chameleon_coalition
Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ) is a NYC-based choreographer, movement educator and multi-platform artist who uses improvisation as a tool for research and creation; blending dance, healing modalities, sound, internet art, humor and strategies of self-compassion in her original performance practice called, Star Pû Method (f.k.a. Star Crap Method). LVJ was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grant to Artists, in 2016. www.larissavelez.com