American Realness is an annual festival of contemporary performance, in its seventh season, held at Abrons Arts Center. Housing seventy events by nineteen artists, ensembles, and scholars has the Abrons jam packed with the innovative work they are known for cultivating. Off-site shows span as far across town as MoMA P.S.1.
I don’t know about y’all, but when attending festivals of this kind, I come expecting to see new, ambitious works, and I especially come to support stories that reflect the voice of my people.
Well, I think I found something that has equal parts ambition and fresh insight into Black manhood.
Artist, Cultural Strategist, Curator and Writer, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, presents #negrophobia, a social commentary, and critique to bring light to perceptions of “grief, misogyny and black patriarchal constructs of masculinity housed within the chaotic frame of a body and mind on the verge of psychosomatic collapse.”
In short, he wants to expose the eroticism and fear that comes along with being a human in a Black male body.
#negrophobia was originally commissioned by Gibney Dance Center and is made possible with the support of friends of anonymous bodies and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund with residency support from the Bushwick Starr and Miami Theater Center. Harlem Stage also helped make this production possible.
Kosoko was the co-curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performances at BAAD in the Bronx. He contributes to the Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC). Kosko has participated as a fellow with DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He is an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University.
Head over to the Lower East Side to see Kosoko’s work
January 8, 2016 – January 17, 2016
at Underground Theater as part of American Realness at Abrons Arts Center.
Friday, January 8, 5:30 PM
Saturday, January 9, 8:30 PM
Sunday, January 10, 5:30 PM
Monday, January 11, 8:30 PM
Sunday, January 17th, 1 PM
Run Time: 75 minutes
For more information on the festival visit americanrealness.com.
