Lecture-Performance
Im/possible Echoes: Sonic Traces, Dis-quieting Lines, Un-binding Moves
Feat. the live performance Corpuscular Cores
Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an influential composer and musician navigating the im/possibility to work at the core of the minimalist music scene in the United States while being an unapologetically Black gay man. In Corpuscular Cores, Oxana Chi and Layla Zami perform dance and music as echoes of his complex life and legacy. The choreography and composition were created in response to a graphic score designed by Romi Morrison as part of the project Song Book: The Quotient of Desire, and as a commissioned work for the Kitchen New York (2023). Ahead of the performance, Dr. Zami contextualizes the work with a lecture moving at the crossroads of performance, gender and Black studies. The talk addresses cultural memory, sonic and embodied perception modes, contemporary improvisation and performance history, in their entanglement with current topics of social justice.
Performance Credits
Choreography, Dance: Oxana Chi
Music (saxophone, loops) composed and performed by: Layla Zami
Drums soundtrack performed by Hervé Hartock, composed and recorded by Layla Zami
Graphic Score by Romi Morrison
Commissioned work by The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency with Simons Foundation and School For Poetic Computation as part of the project Songbook: The Quotient of Desire.
Premiere: The Kitchen, NYC, September 2023
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Dr. Layla Zami is a French-Caribbean interdisciplinary academic, artist and musician. Her research, teaching, and creative work orbit around cultural memory, diaspora, performance (studies), art (history), and spacetime. She is professor at the Campus Caraïbéen des Arts in Martinique, where she teaches entangled art history, performance studies and the graduate research seminar. Zami was a professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and a Co-Chair of Black Lives Matter at Pratt. Other appointments include NYU Berlin, Columbia University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she earned her PhD in transdisciplinary gender studies and a teaching award. She is the author of Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma and Diaspora in the 21st Century (Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research, Honorable Mention, 2023). Her articles and essays were published by Wendy’s Subway, Women & Performance, liquid blackness, and Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, among others. A delicate and versatile saxophone player, Zami creates and performs music/sounds/theater for Oxana Chi Dance & Art. Together, the duo has gratefully and gracefully performed at universities, theaters and festivals across the globe.
Oxana Chi is a German-Nigerian dancer-choreographer, curator, filmmaker and visual artist. At the heart of her feminist practice is an exploration of how our present is built upon in/visible remnants of the past and its porous relationship to our futures. Her repertoire comprises 20 productions, including commissions for The Kitchen, LBI New York, and Humboldt-University Berlin. Chi taught choreography at Freie Universitaet Berlin and was a guest teaching artist at NYU. A keynote performer at the Black German Heritage & Research Association Conference, she has performed on the five continents at venues and events such as Volksbühne Berlin, HAU, Schauspielhaus Dortmund, JACK Crystal Theater, Dixon Place, 14Y, Weeksville Heritage Center, and many universities. Chi was an inaugural AIRspace Resident at the Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan, is a Performance Studies international awardee (Johannesburg, 2023), and was a Co-Curator of Dance for the International Human Rights Art Festival. Listed in The Dance Enthusiast’s “A to Z of People Who Power The Dance World” (2018), her work appears in several books and journals including Black Lives Under Nazism, Dance Research Journal, and Recherches en danse. Her multidisciplinary exhibition and performance project celebrating three decades of artistic productions culminated in the publication Sichtbar Bleiben: Black Lesbian Archives Matter!
Instagram: @chizami
