Installation is an open-ended collection of installation works presented alongside performance work in jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham’s Let ‘im Move You series. The works are a combination of media including video projection, audio, and sculpture that consider strategic essentialism and code switching as defense mechanisms and means of survival.
ABOUT
Let ‘im Move You is a series of artistic works that reflects a 10-year artistic collaboration between jumatatu m. poe and Jermone “Donte” Beacham. This body of work was initiated by jumatatu’s interest in Jermone’s approach to J-Sette, which is a call-and-response dance form that developed in early 1980’s by women’s majorette teams at historically Black colleges in the United States. Leagues of Black Queer men, prohibited from trying out as majorettes, have since formed competitive J-Sette teams in gay clubs and pride parades across the country. At Abrons Arts Center, jumatatu and Jermone present four components of the Let ‘im Move You series: Intervention (October 9); This Is a Formation (October 10-12); Installation (October 10-13); and Queer Slow Jam Party (October 12). (Dance, October 9-13, 2019).
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In the Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater
Let ’im Move You:
This Is a Formation
World Premiere
Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 7:00PM
This Is a Formation is the latest dance performance project in jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham’s Let ‘im Move You series, a collection of performance and visual works centered around the artists’ explorations with the J-Sette form. Formation brings together 7 Black dancers, a DJ, and a lighting designer as performers for the work. Audiences travel within the performance space with relative freedom, sharing the same spaces as performers. Live captured video design elements will focus on close-up capture of the performers for display on hanging panels throughout the space, referencing both hyper-surveillance of Black people’s bodies, and pop-star scale megalomania.
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In the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse Theater
Joshua Gelb and Nehemiah Luckett
jazz singer
World Premiere
Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 8:00PM
jazz singer is a theatrical exhumation of the first feature-length “sound film” The Jazz Singer, reinterpreted by Joshua William Gelb and Nehemiah Luckett. Set on the Lower East Side, the 1927 film tells the story of a “jazz crooner” forced to choose between his immigrant Jewish heritage and his aspirations to become a Broadway star. Though the film is historically significant for its integration of synchronized sound, it is also remembered for its controversial use of blackface. Gelb and Luckett’s musical rendering offers a contemporary take on a distinctly U.S. American story, one that interrogates appropriation, assimilation, atonement, and whether escape from the specter of blackface is possible.
Tickets for all performances available here