Chameleon (The Troy Installments)
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a performance artist and poet who works with dance, media, and sound on stage and in museums. He is in residence at EMPAC to develop a new work, Chameleon, which will have its premiere at New York Live Arts in 2020.
Chameleon is a multimedia project that uses performance to explore the role of media archives in American Black diasporic communities. Archives of protest and collaborative action take the form of documentary film, popular music and television, and cell phone footage of an event captured by a witness on the street. Chameleon uses theatrical technologies to reveal the subversive impact that these archives have on the systemic oppression and erasure of minoritarian communities.
For his EMPAC residency, Kosoko and a team of AV collaborators will conceive and develop their own archive of sound and visual material that will become central to Chameleon. They will then collaborate with the EMPAC team to create elements of a stage performance that moves fluidly between body, image, sound, and text. Kosoko will return to EMPAC in November 2019 to continue this research toward a film installation, podcast series, and live performance event at New York Live Arts in 2020.
The work-in-progress showing for this event will include a conversation with the artist during an early-stage technical residency, so its structure and form will be determined by the artist’s creative process. Work-in-Progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.
Main Image: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. Photo: Erik Carter
Dates + Tickets
Season
Chameleon is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Chameleon is supported in part by a commission from New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency program with additional support from the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Council Member Corey Johnson, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Shubert Foundation.
Additional support provided by LAX Festival, the AIR MFA Program with UARTS Philadelphia at CCN Montpellier, Friends of Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Studio 303 Montreal, and DOCH in collaboration with Within Practice - Sweden.
EMPAC Spring 2019 presentations, residencies, and commissions are made possible by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with continuous support from the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts; and the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts. Additional project support by the National Endowment for the Arts; the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
