Black Parades. Queer Magics.

Spring 2021

About the piece

After the pandemic necessitated rescheduling Ni’Ja Whitson’s Spring 2020 residency, we situated their work in collaboration with Professor Tavia Nyong’o’s seminar on Black Queer performance studies.

A devised public performance that meditates on the magics of migrations, parades, processionals, marches, bodily interventions. Thinking on healing. Thinking on queer and trans holy play. Thinking on a world-making of something else.

Directed and Conceived by Ni’Ja Whitson, Yale artist in residence in collaboration with Tavia Nyong’o and Rhea Sakinah, Andrew Ntim, Emma Pernudi-Moon, Gundula Kreuzer, and Alex Fialho.

Note: This performance will include audio and video of rallies, marches, and speeches that address violence against Black people.
 
This project was co-commissioned by Emily Coates and the Yale Dance Lab and Professor Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Queer Performance Studies seminar.

Dancers

Marshals: Maxi Himpe, Natalie King, başak, Chayton Pabich Danyla, Pap Souleye Fall

About the Artist

 Ni’Ja Whitson NY/LA, is a United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time “Bessie”
Award winning, Queer Nonbinary Trans multidisciplinary artist and futurist, wound and word
worker, who has been referred to as “majestic” by The New York Times and recognized
by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. Whitson engages a critical intersection of a sacred
and conceptual transdiciplinarity in Black, Queer, and Trans-embodiedness, site, body, and
spirit. Whitson is an 18 th  St. Artist in Residence (Los Angeles), 2020 Center for Performance
Research technical resident, Hermitage Fellow, featured choreographer of the 2018 CCA
Biennial, 2018-2020 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellow, and invited presenter at
the 2019 Tanzkongress international festival.  Other recent awards include a 2018 Tarpaulin Sky
Book Prize Shortlist (The Unarrival Experiments), Jerome/Camargo Fellowship, Dance in
Process (DiP) Residency, Hedgebrook Fellowship, LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco
Fellowship. Recent commissions include EMPAC, Danspace Project, BAM Next Wave Art,
American Realness Festival, California African American Museum. They are an Assistant
Professor of experimental choreography at UC Riverside and Artistic Director of The NWA
Project. www.nijawhitson.com