Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Post-performances Discussions:
Thursday, February 25th – facilitated by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Friday, February 26th – facilitated by James Claiborne
An art event by curator, performer, and poet Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Black Male Revisited is an examination of Kosoko’s Nigerian-American masculinity through a series of first person narratives, poems, and original songs. This performance, which Kosoko calls a “memorial site of personal and societal trauma,” features musical accompaniment by Brooklyn-based visual and sonic artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.
Black Male Revisited is Kosoko’s attempt to begin a dialogue about issues of visibility for Black Male Performance and Visual Artists. Part live performance, part installation, Black Male Revisited is a mini retrospective of Kosoko’s earlier works. Furthermore, the piece is an homage to and recontextualization of the Whitney Museum’s pivotal Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1994).
We are presenting this show in three performances with limited ticketing. The theater will be configured uniquely to offer an intimate feel. This show is so relevant to conversations taking place on a national level, we want our audience have as much access as possible, and really connect with Jaamil.
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Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is based between Brooklyn 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 a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University. As a performer, Kosoko 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, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. Kosoko’s poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a multidisciplinary performer, conceptualizer, and laborer whose work is a constant re-evaluation and complication of the Black body’s relationship to environments and the various agencies that inhabit them. He frequently collaborates with musicians, designers, videographer, and choreographers, often under the alias CROWNS.
Performances may contain full male nudity as well as adult themes and language.
