As part of the spring dance course “Being and Doing: Dance for Every Body,” taught by Lecturer in Dance Aynsley Vandenbroucke, artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko gives a talk entitled “Decolonizing Practice — On Healing and Other Performance Strategies for Bodies in Protest.”
How do we as movement practitioners train and strengthen the mind and body for healing in resistance to oppressive structures and systems? How does self care and personal meditation support and prepare us for site-based and theatrical radical performance making? In this workshop, Jaamil Kosoko shares his personal mission and practice for performance making and community organizing through a series of group conversations and exercises.
The talk begins at 12:30 p.m. in New South 108. Open only to Princeton students, faculty, and staff.
Originally from Detroit, JAAMIL OLAWALE KOSOKO is a Nigerian American independent performance and humanities curator, producer, cultural strategist, poet, and artist currently based between Brooklyn, New York and Philadelphia. With his creative partner Kate Watson-Wallace, he co-directs anonymous bodies, a visual performance company focusing on innovative approaches to curation, performance, and education. He is an inaugural APAP Leadership Fellow, a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a 2014 American Express Leadership Academy alum, a contributing correspondent for Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 Fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University. Kosoko is a Founding Advisory Board Member of the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving and was most recently elected to the Executive Committee on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA.
Kosoko’s work in live performance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Kosoko’s poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo, among other publications. He has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Baker Artists Awards, among others. Current curatorial appointments include projects with 651 Arts, The Watermill Center, Movement Research, and The Bushwick Starr in New York City.
