Facilitated by renowned poet literary, theorist, and professor, Rosamond S. King, this literary workshop will explore the profound writings of Gwendolyn Brooks and reflect on how her work remains relevant today.
Participants will then compose and share poetry of their own. This workshop will also offer space for Black expressive resistance and imagination, exploring how Black poetry and literature bring new perspectives to narratives and stories relevant to the community.
Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most profound poets and authors of the 20th century. Born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, she migrated to Chicago, where she documented the interiority of the Black people who also called the city home. Brooks is the first among the choral ancestral and contemporary Black voices included in this season’s upcoming piece, Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends. In this workshop, writer Rosamond S. King will guide attendees to engage Brooks’ writing found in the performance and reflect on its contemporary relevance before they compose poetry of their own.
This event is FREE but donations are strongly encouraged to help us continue this important work! All reservations will be treated as first come, first served at the venue so please try to arrive on time.
This workshop is Part Two of Against Gravity: Community Fly Zone Workshop Series, in collaboration with André M. Zachery, Artistic Director of Renegade Performance Group & Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, Lead Architect of DuSable City. This series aims to encourage introspection, uplift key historical figures, and honor the abundance of ways Black masculinity exists today through movement, film, and poetry. Community Fly Zone Workshops leads up to the World Premiere of Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends in January 2025.
Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends is a solo performance that uses movement to explore the self-examination of Black masculinity through history, memory, text, poetry, and geography. It is a personal narrative that begins with Zachery’s youth in 1980-90’s Chicago and intersects with three legendary figures: Fred Hampton, Ben (Benji) Wilson, and Harold Washington. Guided in part by the oracular voice of Chicago ancestor and Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the performer grapples with the legacy of these three men – a revolutionary, an athletic phenomenon and a post-Civil Rights era politician, all viewed in their primes as messiahs.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
ROSAMOND S. KING
Photo Credit: New York University
Writer and performer Rosamond S. King is the author of poetry collections All the Rage and the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone. Her poems have also been published in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, including The Feminist Wire, Hyperallergic, and The New Daughters of Africa. She has read, performed, and taught around the world, including Poets House, the Bocas Literary Festival, and the African Performance Art Biennial. www.rosamondSking.black
ANDRÉ M. ZACHERY
Photo Credit: Tara Lynn Pixley
André M. Zachery is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist of Haitian and African American descent and is a scholar, researcher, and technologist with a BFA from Ailey/Fordham University and an MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from CUNY/Brooklyn College. As the artistic director of Renegade Performance Group his practice, research, and community engagement artistically focused on merging choreography, technology, and Black cultural practices through multimedia work. André is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography and a 2019 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Choreography.
His works through RPG have been presented domestically and internationally, receiving support through several residencies, awards, and commissions. These have included the LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, Dance/NYC Coronavirus Relief Fund, CUNY Dance Initiative, Performance Project Residency at University Settlement, ChoreoQuest Residency at Restoration Arts Brooklyn, 3LD Art & Technology Center, HarvestWorks and a Jerome-supported Movement Research AIR. Awarded grants have been from the Brooklyn Arts Council, Harlem Stage Fund for New Work, and a Slate Property SPACE Award. Commissions have come from the Brooklyn Museum, Five Myles/BRIC Biennial, and Danspace Project.
RPG has earned mentions and favorable reviews from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Culturebot, Infinite Blogspot, Futuristically Ancient, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, the Daily News, and AFROPUNK. As a technologist, André has collaborated with various artists through RPG, the design team of 3LD Art & Technology Center, and The Clever Agency on design installations, immersive media productions, film productions, film editing, projection mapping, and performance collaborations.
André has worked on significant projects across artistic mediums as a choreographer, media designer, and consultant with artists such as Daniel Bernard Roumain, Cynthia Hopkins, Davalois Fearon, Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, Arin Maya, Rags & Ribbons, The Clever Agency, Kendra Foster, Manhattan School of Music, Burwell & Sasser and Spike Lee.
André is an Assistant Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Dance Department at NYU. As a scholar, he has been a member of panels, led group talks, facilitated discussions, and presented research on a myriad of topics including Afrofuturism, African Diaspora practices, and philosophies, Black cultural aesthetics, technology in art and performance, and expanding the boundaries of art making within the community. He has been a panelist and presented his research at institutions such as Duke University, Brooklyn College, University of Virginia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is an advisory board member of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado. André has taught at Brooklyn College and been a guest faculty member at the dance programs of Florida State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, The Ohio State University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of California Riverside.
AYINDE JEAN-BAPTISTE
Photo Credit: Shantre Pinkney
3rd culture seed of two Caribbeans — one born in the 1st surviving republic in the Western Hemisphere to throw off the yoke of slavery, the other in a colony, Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (Ayinsko: he\they\li) does what it takes, using voice to shift culture, engaging with communities of listening, memory-making, and movement.
Disciple of Kamau Brathwaite, Ayinsko is a sanba/ keeper of memory, whose modal practice shifts as needed — the participatory media project DuSable City, the online creative sousou Someplace Like Home, the experi(m)ent(i)al podcapsule trance-mission DrumLanguage (2013-16), occasional acts of journalism.
Over the past decade this work has been supported by City Lore, Chicago Community Trust, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, THREAD at Yale, City Bureau, CCCADI, Voqal, & the Center for Cultural Power.
Ayinsko has also served as multiformat arts presenter with The Brooklyn Museum, Haiti Cultural Exchange, City Lore, the DuSable Museum, Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Franke Center for the Arts & more, as well as in advisory & solidarity roles with Let Us Breathe Collective & Honey Pot Performance.
@Ayinsko, anywhere
@DuSableCity, right here