About

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American performance artist, poet, and curator originally from Detroit, MI. His creative practice draws from Black study and queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. Recent awards include a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2019 NPN Development Fund Award, 2019-21 Movement Research Artist in Residence, 2018-20 Live Feed Artist at New York Live Arts, 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellow, 2017 MAP Fund recipient, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. His works have toured internationally to South Africa, Europe, Canada, and throughout the US appearing in festivals and venues such as The Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), Fusebox Festival (Austin), PICA | Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Tanz im August (Berlin), Moving in November (Finland), Within Practice (Sweden),TakeMeSomewhere (UK), Brighton Festival (UK), Oslo Teaterfestival (Norway), and Zürich MOVES! (Switzerland) among others. He is the author of two chapbooks:

Animal in Cyberspace and Notes on An Urban Killfloor.

Visit jaamil.com or follow @chameleon_coalition on Instagram for more information.

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Fall 2020 Classes:

Beyond the Academy: Art in the Real World

WLARTS CM168/CM268

This seminar investigates the concept of queer archival practice and creation as interactive pedagogy and performance. Students will be asked to research a topic of their choosing. Using embodied systems of emergence and improvisation as a means to expose and illuminate historically erased, forgotten, and/or hidden relics from the past and the present, we consider the following questions: How does the use of one’s imagination spark social and systemic change in the world? What does it mean to devote one’s life to this kind of work? Blurring the lines between the creative and political experience, students will be introduced to the radical contemporary practices that interdisciplinary artists use to build creative, impactful work and lives. Our texts will include live and recorded performances, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources. The class will also feature pioneering artists working internationally. Students will be encouraged to take 2 to 3 field trips to surrounding cultural events to witness live performances, lectures, protests, exhibitions, and/or nature.

This course welcomes ALL people! This space encourages individuals who identify as QTPOC, Black, and/or indigenous to participate. This course is inclusive and open to artist-citizens who are interested in grappling with themes of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and identity within their own creative practice. Our sessions will take place weekly via Zoom and Discord. Specific links will be sent after class registration is complete. Please click here to review the resource guide.

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Chameleon (a repertory remix…)

DANCE C174A/C274A

If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.
- Audre Lorde

Centering community building and the construction of radical kinship and care as performance, participants in this repertory course will hone skills related to personal narrative as a site of creative investigation, renewal, and healing. Using Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s most recent digital work, American Chameleon: The Living Installments, as a point of departure students will learn tools and strategies for building experimental performance both on and offline. Together, using an interdisciplinary performance studies approach, we will explore the interactive digital sphere of the *biomythography, while incorporating various sites of contemporary art practices: literature, fashion, film, sound, and performance within a social and historical context. The ensemble will share personal narratives, histories, and the possibilities for creating a new collective future. Students are encouraged to be in a process of creating their own improvisational research and willing to open their practice by working both collectively and independently.
The term *Biomythography refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982, which combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.

This course welcomes ALL people! This space encourages individuals who identify as QTPOC, Black, and/or indigenous to participate. This course is inclusive and open to artist-citizens who are interested in grappling with themes of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and identity within their own creative practice. Our sessions will take place weekly via Zoom and Discord. Specific links will be sent after class registration is complete. Please click here to review the resource guide.