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Past Performing Arts | Theater
$20 members $24 general public $12 students
Multidisciplinary performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko takes on the racialized body, systemic oppression, and personal loss in Séancers, a viscerally intense journey into the black experience.
One of the most interesting figures in performance today, Kosoko has crafted a series of bold, challenging works that incorporate spoken word, original music, ecstatic movement, and provocative costuming to examine how bodies of color are transformed by—and survive—grief, violence, and hypersexualized stereotyping. Several of these works have delved deeply into the deaths of his mother, father, and brother. Their ghosts and others are exorcised here as Kosoko journeys into surreal and fantastical states of the black imagination to interrogate the history of American colonialism and bravely traverse what he describes as the “the fatal axis of abstraction, illegibility and gender complexity.” Special guest séancers will help frame your witnessing of each performance—an engrossing spiritual, emotional, and theoretical world created by Kosoko and sound artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.
Please note: this performance uses theatrical haze.
GUEST SÉANCERS Dec 6 Dr. Nadine George-Graves, Artist and Professor, Ohio State Departments of Dance and Theatre
Dec 7 Crystal Michelle Perkins, Artist and Assistant Professor, Ohio State Department of Dance
Dec 8 Bebe Miller, Artist and Emerita Professor, Ohio State Department of Dance; Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipient
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Séancers, photo: Leni Olafsun
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Bessie Award–nominated, Nigerian American performance artist, poet, curator, community organizer, and educator. His performance work has been presented throughout the US and Europe, and his poems, interviews, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Dunes Review, Dance Journal, and Critical Correspondence, among other publications. Kosoko has received a series of fellowships, grants, and awards—in 2017 alone he was a Princeton University Arts Fellow, Jerome Foundation AIRspace Residency artist at Abrons Arts Center, Association of Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellow, and Cave Canem Poetry Fellow—and he continues to guest teach, speak, and lecture internationally.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s web site
New York Times profile on Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
This presentation of Séancers is supported by the Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from the Ohio Arts Council and the Crane Group.
MAJOR SEASON SUPPORT FOR PERFORMING ARTS Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
EVENT SUPPORT Arts Midwest Touring Fund National Endowment for the Arts
ACCOMMODATIONS The Blackwell Inn
GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT FOR THE WEXNER CENTER Greater Columbus Arts Council Ohio Arts Council The Columbus Foundation Nationwide Foundation
Past Performing Arts
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko