2015 – present
Collaborative project
Collaborators: WXPT, Ashley Hunt, Kim Zumpfe

The school is a space for movement-based experiences that model ways to stand together in difference, to explore and share personal stories, to develop capacities for ‘listening in the dark’ through stillness and silence, and to cultivate awareness of how and when to assert oneself for the advancement of the community. It makes space for explicit and direct discussion on issues related to Black life, anti-blackness and queer people of color. The material of each different class always returns to the question: What is a Black dance curriculum today?

Exhibition catalogue and curriculum booklet (2015)

April 30 – May 28, 2016
Installation/school and performance
DiverseWorks, Houston, TX and Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX
Additional collaborators: Celestina Billington, Brittani Broussard, Adam Castaneda, Caleb Fields, Rosine Kouamen, Eternal Lokumbe, Norola Morgan, and Kenneth Owens

In April 2016, the DiverseWorks gallery was set up as a rehearsal studio, photo shoot and experimental classroom, where the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People researched their ongoing question, What is a Black dance curriculum today?, within the context of Houston. Convened in the memory of an erased Black school in East Texas, the School built a curriculum responding to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds, seeking new relationships, possibilities, freedoms and sovereign spaces. Through performances, workshops, and conversations, curriculum activities included wanderings, gatherings, dispersions, the lifting of people, the staging of images and other embodied practices, developing scores that were taken out into different communities throughout Houston.

DiverseWorks “Meadow” performance, classes, installation

Fusebox performance, classes, installation

October 21 – December 6, 2015
Installation/school and performance
Curated by Robert Crouch, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA

This installation took the form of a school as an artistic and social problem, building the School’s curriculum and infrastructure through physical and social sculpture, performance and image, where the roles of artist and viewer, dancing and non-dancing body, art and learning coalesce. The continual programming consisted of workshops, weekly classes and micro-performances initiated by members of WXPT. The curriculum was open to all, blurring lines between audience and participant, while especially encouraging queer people of color to join. Across the bodies of the company and the members of the public who joined the school, the curriculum built an accumulative performance score in weekly increments, which culminated in a performance at the conclusion of the exhibition.

LACE “Meadow” performance, classes, installation