Performances: JM Nimocks, CJ Wattley

  • Date: February 18, 2022
  • Time: 10:00 am—11:30 am
  • Location: SHINE Portrait Studio
  • Speakers
  • Moderator/s

J.M. Nimocks

‘SPECTACULAR FORMS PRESENTS:’ 

As an ontological philosophy and performance studies scholar who is invested in the vast and nuanced articulations of blackness and sexuality, I find myself curious about the labor of love that can be forged from the materiality in sound and affect. In Phonographies (2005), Weheliye points to the possibility of the sonic to provide refuge where corporeality does not succeed. How might the immaterial or the affective collaborate with material forms to move through the infinite wonderment of blackness? A grounding theoretical question then becomes: is the affective, through elements of performance such as sound and playfulness, capable of embodying alternative genders if we assume that gender is a performance as articulated in Butler’s essay, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1986) ? ‘SPECTACULAR FORMS PRESENTS:’ is an ongoing project that is in conversation with frameworks such as Lorraine O’Grady’s ‘both/and’ concept, which calls forth a necessary intellectual and artistic undertaking and muddying of social dichotomies especially related to blackness: abjection & liberation ; subjectivity & objectivity ; the corporeal & the phantom. ‘SPECTACULAR FORMS PRESENTS:’ serves as an offering in conversation with these musings and seeks no definite or limiting conclusion. The first iteration of this multidisciplinary series will explore blackness, eroticism, queer forms, and ecology through the sonic, visual, and live performance. The live performance component will be between 5-7 minutes and will begin in a dark room with the performer discussing their frustrations with their perceived (in)visibility in thought with Ralph Ellerson’s Invisible Man (1952). The film then begins and the performer will enter the room moving in relation with the projected video through a short, burlesque-style drag performance. The performance will conclude with a brief presentation on the artists’ perpetual curiosity: How does relationality evade rootedness and move towards, as Kara Keeling might describe, a necessary Elsewhere?

CJ Wattley

Honey: Joy and Other Forbidden Fruits

Orphan is a series of rituals in the form of public performance and three-dimensional sculpture. The piece consists of three conjuh boxes which act as catalysts for ideas around love, shame and choice. This project is an episode of a larger body of work which explores the mythological identity. of Black boys through literature, performance and ritual. Attendant to each performance is a pre-recorded voiceover which serves as a ritual poetics. 

Orphan is inspired by the assertion from bell hooks that one path to wellness for black men starts with the careful study of Black feminist and womanist texts. It bends into an analysis of how those writers and thinkers were able to develop a method of considering themselves in their spiritual context, rather than in a solely material one. Ultimately, it widens with the implementation of those analyzed techniques in communities of Black men and boys. Orphan takes this path and incorporates ideas from conjuh artist Amara Tabor Smith, the Bay Area choreographer who coined the term and the practice. 

The piece itself follows the story of a nameless, archetypal black boy referred to as the Orphan. The Orphan interacts with each conjuh box to explore other archetypes (ways of being) in regards to love, shame and choice. This is a narrative of self-definition and exploration as it pertains to the experiences of Black boys in this day and age. I use my own personal narrative as a blueprint to explore the role that a conjuh practice might play in the creation of a spiritual identity outside of those given to me throughout my life (oreo, nigger, beast, reject, criminal, etc). Orphan is a work of soulcraft, intended to ask those heavy  questions which have even weightier answers.


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