“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
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Séancers collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection and paranormal activity.
Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is a nonlinear examination of how the American racialized body uses psychic, spiritual, and theoretical strategies to shapeshift through socio-politically charged fields of loss and oppression. The work collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of grief, resurrection and paranormal activity.
Interrogating issues related to American history and colonialism, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of the Black imagination to traverse the “fatal” axis of abstraction, illegibility and gender complexity.
Part of American Realness 2018
Co-Produced by Abrons Arts Center & Gibney Dance
