White State – Black Mind / Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Public lecture: White State | Black mind, 11.00-12.15
Workshop: Unfolding the Transgressive Body, 13.00-16.00

Public lecture: White State | Black Mind – Film Screening & Discussion, 11.00 – 12.15
‘We do know, however, what blackness indicates: existence without standing in the modern world system. To be black is to exist in exchange without being a party to exchange. Being black is belonging to a stateorganized according to its ignorance of your perspective – a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind…. It is a kind of invisibility.’ Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery

Performance and other forms of creative practice can reimagine or reframe the world, but how does performance as an activist practice help us foreground and work through structural and systemic forms of violence and oppression, in particular as these relate to Black identities? What might queer, oblique and alternative readings of society reveal about the intricacies and multiplicities of Blackness? Come and join us for a discussion about the company’s work and some of the broader critical issues and stakes it raises.

Film by Marica De Michele and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko.
Q&A by Lara Staal.

Preparation for the lecture: If you want to be  well prepared you can read the introduction and chapter 1 of White Innocence by Gloria Wekker. (This book is also available in Dutch language).

Workshop: Unfolding The Transgressive Body, 13.00-16.00
 
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

– Audre Lorde, A Litany For Survival


How do we as movement practitioners train and strengthen the mind and body to resist oppressive structures and systems? How might tools of self care, personal meditation, and psychic choreographic systems support and prepare us for site based and/or theatrical radical performance making? How does the teaching of theory promote new systems for intellectual simulation and understanding.

Centering an interdisciplinary approach to live performance making, this creative lab will consider how we as artist-citizens strengthen the mind and body to resist normalized structures of performance to release, activate, and translate unknown, foreign, and/or vulnerable materials into live performance actions. Students will conduct research, view and critique live performance and create cosmologies of their creative influencers. Open to all students interested in exploring their previously uncharted performative potential.Participants are encouraged to bring questions about their own work and practice that they are willing to unfold and share within a group environment.