Collaborations
In the last 3 years I have participated in several collaborative projects including:
1. Treads - The Wearable Art Fashion Show
2. The Radical Performance Group
3. Stripped/Strapped Women in Revolution
Threads - The Wearable Art Fashion Show, the most recent project, was a collaboration with Juliana Cope at the Jersey City Museum in New Jersey, Usa. The show opened with the festive piece Body Bootie, where the artists used movement and materials to celebrate life, and the uninhibited joy of youth. I performed on stage in a colorful plastic crocheted coustume while pregnant. As the opening piece this performance was perfectly contrasted with the closing piece, Undercovers: A Bespoke Burial Blanket which addressed the way some cultures prepare their dead for burial.
Stripped/Strapped, a collaboration with Adeola Enigbokan was an exploration of women’s roles in revolutionary movements and ideology, vis á vis their agency as combatants. The project invoked the pageantry and populism of Afro-Caribbean tradition. The site of the performance (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn at the Fulton Arts Festival), was carefully chosen to reach an audience often marginalized in the practice of "high" art. The project consisted of three main elements: |
1. The live street performance at the African Arts Festival held every year in Brooklyn.
2. The website @ www.interconnex.org/x.html which linked the performance to real experiences using the voices and images of real woman in conflict around the world, some who had ended their own lives for their cause. The site goes on to offer an alternative to ceaseless fighting. We highlight the example of a group of Nigerian women who in July 2002 engaged in creative civil disobedience to effectively protest the oil companies in the Chevron Texaco oil terminal.
3. The third element was the open invitation for audience participation in the discussion, through the website.
I also worked with a grassroots activist art group in the US. This group called Radical Performance Group, boasts a mailing list of over 200 persons who we called upon to participate in impromptu actions in the subways and streets. In 2007 I participated in many of the main performances, attended most of the planning meetings and hosted an seasonal wrap-up for the group where all the work of the year was screened for guests.
Radical Performance Group projects ran from March to September 2007. Visit www.123rpg.blogspot.com for details on Radical Performance Group projects.
Treads - The Wearable Art Fashion Show took place on February 24th, 2008, New Jersey, USA.
Stripped/Strapped was performed in July 2004, New York, USA.
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