mayfield brooks: Sensoria: An Opera Strange
Part of Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II)
Thursday, June 9, sunset, Arrive by 7:30pm
Friday, June 10, sunset, Arrive by 7:30pm
Saturday, June 11, sunset, Arrive by 7:30pm
*Proof of vaccination with 1st booster and mask required for entry.*
This event will not have a waitlist. Please purchase your tickets ahead of time.
Accessibility: Some visual description will be provided by the performers. Tickets are available for blind or visually impaired audience members. Please email Seta@
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mayfield brooks is a performer, artist, urban farmer, and originator of the interdisciplinary movement project, Improvising While Black. Sensoria: An Opera Strange is a continuation of brooks’ Whale Fall Cycle – a series of written, digital and live provocations based on a whale’s decomposition process when its body falls to the ocean floor and feeds thousands of sea creatures. the first of which was a Bessie Award nominated film entitled Whale Fall.
Sensoria: An Opera Strange is an invitation into different auditory fields inspired by whale songs, laments, acoustic uprisings, and revolutionary chants. “Questions emerging from this stage of the Whale Fall Cycle are: ‘Who am I feeding?,’ ‘How am I listening?,’ and ‘What ghosts am I dancing with?,’” writes brooks. “When the continual hum of extraction dominates the auditory field, how does one attune to the ancestor’s whisper, and feed the hungry disembodied ghosts of our time?”
Choreography/Direction by: mayfield brooks
Performed by: mayfield books with Yusa Jacobo, and Julienne Rencher, Gabriel Torta, and Indira Suganda (1965-2009)
Performer/Audio Describer: Roger Q Mason
Composer: Anya Yermakova
Pianist: Patric Maguire
Stage Manager: Mars Neri
Dramaturg/Production Assistant: duskin drum
Set Designer: Caedron Burchfield
Sound Designer: James Kogan
Lighting Designer: Carol Mullins
Filmographers: Suz Murray Sadler and Chagua Camacho-Olguin
Accessibility & Covid Safety at Danspace:
*Proof of vaccination with 1st booster and mask required for entry.* Visit our Accessibility Info page & Covid Safety page for more information and guidelines for attending performances and events our venue.
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are on the faculty at Movement Research NYC and the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. brooks’ dance film, Whale Fall was nominated for a 2021 Bessie Award and they will be a 2022-23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University this year. brooks is an international teacher and performer whose entire body of work arises from their life/art/movement practice, Improvising While Black or IWB.