Reception at 5:30 PM
6:00 PM film screening
Kaufman Hall 200
Film Screening followed by a Q&A facilitated by Prof. Ayasha Guerin
Presented as part of the visiting lecture series, the Alma Hawkin’s Chair, mayfield brooks will share their experimental dance film, Whale Fall. The work explores the potential for new ecologies linking interspecies and ancestral connections.
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is currently the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program.