//shrouded\\

A living poetic sculpture casting the body as an archive of memory, resistance, and transformation.

PHL premiere at icebox project space April 17-29, 2026

NYC Premiere @ Lincoln Center, April 24-25, 2026

//shrouded\\ is an immersive dance performance and living sculpture that explores the body as an archive of memory, resistance, and transformation. Rooted in Black queer temporalities, the work delves into the embodied legacies of displacement and erasure, asking what it means to live with a history of imposed invisibility.

Encased in flowing brown silks, performers move through states of concealment and revelation, enacting a dynamic poetics of opacity and emergence. These veils of fabric become thresholds between seen and unseen worlds, invoking the spectral and the sacred. Through slow, durational movement, //shrouded\\ foregrounds the tensions between visibility and survival, mourning and becoming.

//shrouded\\ Conversations with Akpenamawu Ayanna Haa'Shenit Ma'at Ama Gora

As part of the ongoing research and development of //shrouded\\, these recorded conversations offer a glimpse into the thinking that shapes the work before it takes form on stage.

In this two-part dialogue, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko sits with multidisciplinary artist Akpenamawu Ayanna Haa'Shenit Ma'at Ama Gora (Mawu) to reflect on themes that animate the project: the body as archive, beauty as haunting, the power of concealment, and the ways lineage moves through contemporary performance.

Together they explore how materials, movement, and ritual practice open portals between memory and imagination. What begins as conversation gradually becomes something else. A form of witnessing. A shared inquiry into how artists inherit histories, carry them forward, and transform them through collective practice.

These exchanges are part of the living archive of //shrouded\\. A record of the questions, intuitions, and poetic frameworks that continue to shape the work as it unfolds.

Part 1

Part 2

Part ceremony, part living archive, the work gathers both the living and the departed into a shared field of remembrance. It invites audiences to witness a communal act of remembering and reimagining

Can a multi-generational inheritance of disinvestment be alchemized into a coexistent, abundant future?

Creative Direction: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Presented by: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, NYC

Additional Support: NEFA National Dance Project, Bogliasco Center (Italy), Shadowcliff Artist Residency, The New School, Cannonball Festival, and friends of Kosoko Performance Studio.

Photo: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, courtesy of the artist

About Jaamil

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. Their interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and rest-care strategies for BIPOC+ liberation and reparation.

Jaamil is the author of Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts and two chapbooks, Animal in Cyberspace and Notes of an Urban Kill-Floor. Their works—including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, Séancers, and the Bessie-nominated #negrophobia—have toured internationally to venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, EMPAC, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, New York Live Arts, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Kosoko’s honors include the Doris Duke Performing Arts Technology Lab Grant, NEFA National Dance Project, LMCC’s Extended Life Residency, a Pew Fellowship, and the Princeton Arts Fellowship, among others.