Séancers

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Setting the fugitive experience afforded Black people on fire with majesty, opulence, and agency, Séancers is a performance work that collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive and visual performance to investigate concepts of black magic, resurrection, and paranormal activity. Interrogating issues related to American history and terrorism, Séancers journeys into the surreal and fantastical states of the Black imagination as it traverses the ‘fatal’ axis of abstraction, illegibility, and gender multiplicity. The work locates itself inside the spiritual, emotional, and theoretical world with the live performances of sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and experimental movement artists IMMA and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and a special guest artist-theorist who will help frame the witnessing of each performance.

Photo by Andrew Amorim

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, originally from Detroit, MI, is a Bessie Award nominated Nigerian-American curator, poet, and time-based performance installation artist. He is a 2017 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2017 Jerome Artists in Residence at Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 APAP Leadership Fellow, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. He is a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist and a recipient of a 2017 and 2016 USArtists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. His work has been presented throughout Europe and the United States. He has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, Headlong Dance Theater, among others. Kosoko’s poems, interviews, and essays can be found published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, Silo, Detroit Research v2, Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), Movement Research Performance Journal, and Critical Correspondence (NYC). He continues to guest teach, speak, lecture, and perform internationally. His piece #negrophobia is currently touring throughout Europe with forthcoming dates in Belgium (Beursschouwburg) and Munich (Spielart Festival) Visit jaamil.com or philadiction.org for more information.