SÉANCERS
Séancers at Abrons Arts Center, co-presented by Abrons Arts Center and Gibney as part of American Realness, New York, NY, 2018.
“What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death?”
– Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is an auto-ethnographic performance work that collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms, and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection, and paranormal activity. Interrogating issues related to American history, coloniality, and structural oppression, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of a Black imagination as it traverses the ‘fatal’ axis of abstraction, illegibility, identity, and gender complexity. The work locates itself inside the spiritual, emotional, and theoretical world via the live performances of sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and experimental artist jaamil olawale kosoko, with special guest theorists who will help frame the witnessing of each performance.
People
jaamil olawale kosoko
Imma Asher (performance doula)
Sarah Bishop Stone (US managing producer)
Simone Duff (associate costume design/fabrication)
Alyssa Gersony (research assistant/assistant stage manager)
Jennifer Kidwell (performance doula)
M. Lamar (performance doula)
Emily Reilly (dramaturg)
Tara Sheena (project manager)
Joy Taney (makeup)
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (sound designer/séancer)
SaVonne Whitfield (wardrobe)
Leonie Wichmann (international/european projects manager)
Serena Wong (lighting designer)
Guest Séancers
Dr. Nadine George-Graves (guest séancer at Wexner Center for the Arts)
Bebe Miller (guest séancer at Wexner Center for the Arts)
Crystal Michelle Perkins (guest séancer at Wexner Center for the Arts)
Vanessa-Eileen Thompson (guest séancer at Sophiensaele)
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, PhD (guest séancer at FringeArts)
Christina Knight, PhD (guest séancer at FringeArts)
Sosena Solomon (guest séancer at FringeArts)
Vanessa E. Thompson (guest séancer at Mousontrum)
Emma-Lee Kasbergen (guest séancer at Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival)
Ebony Noelle Golden (guest séancer at Abrons Arts Center)
M. Lamar, Guest Séancer (guest séancer at American Realness and Abrons Arts Center)
Okwui Okpokwasili (guest séancer at American Realness)
Syllabus
Abby Martin's The Empire Files: Black Radical Tradition, with Mumia Abu-Jamal and Cornel West
Karen Thorsen's James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket
Tina Campt, “Black Feminist Futures and The Practice of Fugitivity”
James H. Cone, The Cross and Lynching Tree
Thomas DeFrantz, “i am black (you have to be willing to not know)”
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications
Soraya Murray & Derek Murray, “Public Ritual: William Pope.L and exorcisms of abject otherness”
Okwui Okpokwasili, Bronx Gothic
Howardena Pindell, Free White and 21
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Hortense Spillers, Black White and in Color