Join the IHGC's Race and Performance Lab for a series of events featuring musicians, performers, and writers, who explore the relationship between art, race, politics, and other social constructs.
Student Workshop: Spoken Word, Poetry and Improvisation
Wednesday, April 9th
12:30PM -2PM at the Ruth Caplin Theater**
This will be a workshop with world-renowned musicians and performers Nicole Mitchell, JoVia Armstrong, Damon Locks, S. Ama Wray, Josh Kun, and Joshua White. Participants will be invited to learn about and create experimental art that can address the politics of race, the environment, and musical practice. No experience necessary.
**Location Change
Panel Discussion: Race and Experimental Performance
Thursday, April 10th
12:30PM - 2PM in Wilson 142
This will be a panel discussion featuring musicians, performers, and writers: Nicole Mitchell, JoVia Armstrong, Damon Locks, S. Ama Wray, Josh Kun, and Joshua White, who will discuss their histories and strategies of creating experimental art that speaks to the challenges of our times and reimagines the Black experience.
Spider Web
Thursday, April 10th
7:00pm at The African American Heritage Center (2nd Floor of the Jefferson School, 233 4th St, NW, Charlottesville, VA 22903)
In a collaborative piece originally commissioned by Clockshop, composer/flutist Nicole Mitchell and scholar Josh Kun explore visionary/reflective glitches between 1970s and pre-apocalyptic Southern California in an exploration of race and the politics of human life. Spider Web is fictionally based on Mitchell’s own history of moving to Anaheim as a young girl, and her experiences with racism in the bright glare of suburban California sunshine. With glimpses into a future climate meltdown through her mother’s communication with the spirit world, the piece uses music and text to explore Mitchell’s family history within the context of Southern California’s ongoing history of Black musical radicalism and experimental musical thinking. This piece is born of Mitchell and Kun’s mutual interests in music as a language of social reckoning and social action, and music as a way of coming to grips with the limits and possibilities of place.
The performance is FREE but you must REGISTER to reserve your seat.
Josh Kun is a Grammy nominated cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. His books include Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles, Songs in the Key of Los Angeles, and others. As a curator and artist, his projects have appeared with Prospect New Orleans, Steve Turner Gallery, Grammy Museum, Getty Foundation, SFMOMA, California African American Museum, the Los Angeles Public Library, and more. He has been the recipient of a Berlin Prize and an American Book Award. He is Vice Provost for the Arts at USC, where he is Professor and Chair of Cross-Cultural Communication in the USC Annenberg School.
JoVia Armstrong is a percussionist, sound artist, composer, and educator from Detroit, MI. She endorses several companies, including Sabian, Gon Bops, QSC, and Icon Pro Audio. In 2015, she won the Best Black Female Percussionist of the Year through the Black Women in Jazz Awards and received the 3Arts Siragusa Foundation Artist Award in 2011 for her work as an educator. JoVia sits on the executive board of Chicago's AACM as Secretary. She has performed with Omar, Res, Syleena Johnson, Frank McComb, El DeBarge, Eric Roberson, Rahsaan Patterson, Maysa, The Impressions, Nicole Mitchell, Ballaké Sissoko, Babani Kone, JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, and Chilean artist Joe Vasconcellos. She also served as tour manager and percussionist for Les Nubians and others.
She earned a Ph.D. in the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology program from the University of California- Irvine in June 2022. Her recently released album, The Antidote Suite, has received critical reviews in publications such as Downbeat Magazine, The New York Times, and The Wire. The album was listed as a notable release on NPR's All Things Considered and Bandcamp Daily's album of the day (July 27, 2022). As a sound artist, she has composed sound for art installations, scored films, and created sound designs for gallery spaces and short independent films.
Joshua White is one of the music scene’s most creative and technically accomplished pianists. Praised by legendary musicians like Herbie Hancock as having “immense talent” and lauded for his “daring and courageous approach to improvisation … on the cutting edge of innovation”, Joshua has distinguished himself as a formidable leader of distinct voice among his peers. Born and raised in Southern California, Joshua received early training at the piano and developed rapidly through rigorous study of both Western European Classical literature and the Black American Music traditions. Shortly after placing in the top two as a finalist of the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition, Joshua began performing as a soloist and musical collaborator all over the world — and continues to maintain an active touring schedule throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia. His most frequent collaborators include Mark Dresser, Nicole Mitchell, Eric Revis, Michael Dessen, Steph Richards, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Jeff Parker, Alex Cline, Josh Johnson, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Dwight Trible, Marshall Hawkins, and Gilbert Castellanos, among many others. Additionally, Joshua White can currently be seen and heard leading various configurations of his piano trio (#JWTrio) featuring Dean Hulett, Alex Boneham, Anna Butterss (bass) and Tyler Kreutel, Christian Euman, Dan Schnelle (drums)..."
Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s. She started with Maia and Shanta Nurullah in Samana (the AACM's first all-woman ensemble) and as a member of the David Boykin EXPANSE. Her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections and Ice Crystal, and she composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. The former first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Mitchell celebrates endless possibility by “creating visionary worlds through music that bridge the familiar with the unknown.” Some of her newest work with Black Earth Ensemble explores intercultural collaborations; Bamako*Chicago, featuring Malian kora master, Ballake Sissoko and Mandorla Awakening with Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and Tatsu Aoki (taiko, bass, shamisen). As a composer, Mitchell has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, the Stone, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America (New Works), the Chicago Jazz Festival, ICE, and the Chicago Sinfonietta. Mitchell has performed with creative music luminaries including Craig Taborn, Roscoe Mitchell, Joelle Leandre, Anthony Braxton, Geri Allen, George Lewis, Mark Dresser, Steve Coleman, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Bill Dixon, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ed Wilkerson, Rob Mazurek, and Billy Childs, and Hamid Drake. She is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2011), the Chicago 3Arts Award (2011) , the Doris Duke Artist Award (2012) and the United States Artist Award (2020). Mitchell is a Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, and previously taught at University of California Irvine and the University of Pittsburgh.
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He spent 4 years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He currently teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra, and co-founded the band The Eternals.
S. Ama Wray is a choreographer, teacher, researcher, writer, director, performer, and inventor. A TEDx speaker, she has presented at the United Nations, Princeton, Harvard, The Institute for Advanced Studies and Dance USA, she has similarly taught dance for prominent institutions, including the Martha Graham, The Royal Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Her collaborations in dance, theatre and music have been with Wynton Marsalis, Mojisola Adebayo, Bobby McFerrin, Nicole Mitchell; and for Jane Dudley, she is the custodian of her seminal work, Harmonica Breakdown (1938). She is creator and custodian of Embodiology®, an award-winning practice - an embodied systems thinking approach to improvisation – rooted in African knowledge systems. Redefining practices for human flourishing, she is a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, a California Artists Awardee and A UCI Newkirk Fellow. She has published essays on Embodiology edited volumes and her monograph is forthcoming on Routledge. She continues to develop the work through teaching various learning communities, including non-dancers, students and professionals pursuing careers in art and medicine. A first clinical study on Embodiology’s effects was funded by the Susan Samueli Institute of Integrative Health. Recently she returned to the virtual space to create performances - The Legion of Kinaesonic Healers, advancing toward being a part of ‘social prescribing’ in medicine and public health. In development is MOVE, a research lab where scientific examination of urban, indigenous and ancestral practices of dance and music can take shape with communities of origin as leaders. As a National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts Fellow, her exploration led her to create performances intertwined with technology, manifested as Texterritory – a cell phone based interactive storytelling. Her innovations continue through AI 4 Afrika, an initiative she co-founded with scholars, choreographers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs. Formerly a performer with London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Rambert Dance Company, for over 30 years, dancing remains a joy core of her being. In development is MMOOVEE, a research lab where scientific examinations of urban and ancestral practices of dance and music meet, with a purpose to take their cues from communities of origin