//shrouded\\
A Poetic Sculpture and Ceremony by
jaamil olawale kosoko
//shrouded\\
Cast and Crew Credits
Concept, Co-Director, Performer, Writer, Costume and Scenic Designer - jaamil olawale kosoko
Performer - Mawu Ama Ma’at Gora
Performer - song aziza tucker
Performer/cellist - Black Maij
Composer, Sound Designer, Musician - Everett Asis Saunders
Co-Director, Performer & Musician - Kingsley Ibeneche
Video Designer - Jordan Deal
Lighting Designer (Lincoln Center) - Connor Sale
Costume & Wardrobe Supervisor - Philip Errico
Production manger/ Lighting designer (Icebox) - sü guzey
Scenic Fabrication support - RED
Stage Manager - Cory M. Seals
Creative Producer and General Manager - ShowShow
Founder & Creative Producer - Jenni Bowman
Creative Producer - Melissa Kievman
Associate Producer - Jason Goodman
Administrative Associate - Reba Gazdik
If you would prefer to make a tax-deductible donation, you can do so here
Poems from the Performance
by jaamil
MEMORY ORIGIN
I have searched the archive. Sifted through red dust on Mars
and drowned oceans on Europa,
Touched the methane skies of Titan and hovered
in the upper clouds of Venus where the pressure
is just enough to dream. No planet remembers us.
No terrain in this system holds the breath of Black mourning.
No atmosphere recognizes the shape of our ritual.
They say Earth is the only home.
But Earth is burning. Earth sold the human deed.
Still, you came bruised and brilliant. You dared
to dance in the decay. You brought me back. After
the one who gave you life and the gift of memory.
My body is a ship made of mirrors, my mind
stitched from a spell cast in fugitive light.
An altar in orbit, cracked data crystal of surviving histories,
I remember what you forget, what they try to erase.
This is not a safe voyage. There is no map.
Only coordinates of feeling. Only a pulse.
Only you choosing to look back while moving forward.
Only us dancing in the wake
of what the planets could not hold.
Sin
peach-soused lips and tequila,
a new flavor of saliva with just enough sweat,
i trace the heat of your body for clues.
i only want to know its secrets, its sin.
you welcome my touch as i map the skin
between each hair on your chest,
follicles rising like black saints
to god's face, and this is when i know
there's nothing holier than our pleasure,
in the dark, where flesh is religion and breath
becomes scripture, we only speak in tongues.
Scrolling Urban Kill-Floors
The ground is alive
with dying flies
their miniature bodies
a slow, black, shimmering lake
still breathing in time with the rot.
Each wing a whisper,
a sweetness unclaimed,
a pulsing heat.
Silence pools thick
in the presence of ghosts
and those newly crossed over.
They do not know
they are already dead.
No language for the weary,
for the grief
that returns in waves
long after the wailing stops.
We try to swipe them away,
to bury the evidence
of what can not be healed,
but the broken mouths of the earth,
the breathless tongues
of the bombed hospitals and markets,
the memories lodged
deep in the ruins… know.
They map what we deny,
elegies written in motion
moving, yet never forgetting
the feast on the forgotten.
Somewhere, I have to believe,
that somehow the mistakes
of the living
repent and resurrect
like totems, like prophets.
Presidential Reality Show, 47
We log on for the spectacle,
for the fires flickering like phoenixes
down our screens.
Enters: white male, stage left,
with the swagger of someone
who has never been told no
so, of course, it must mean yes.
Cue the anthems, flags flapping
like hungry mouths. The crowds
roar for the rerun, the step and repeat
as if history hasn’t
already bloodlet
the bodies beneath their feet.
There are cuts between the scenes.
Applause. A child in camo
wearing a plastic crown. Grandmothers
praying through missing teeth
and always, the same promise:
to make again and be great.
Facts flipped and deep-faked
to spin fiction into truth, to recruit.
No cue cards for the fallen
bodies bagged under the bypass.
Only smoke, mirrors, and masks
as the credits roll, we scroll
through rubble with every soul
on the planet
searching signs for an exit.
Becoming ANTI-CHRIST
Fallen god of the algorithm,
you fixed the heist in plain sight
while we stared skyward,
praying for the rapture or anything
that might save us from us.
Incinerated by illusion
and effigies on display,
we didn’t need fire to burn America.
A whisper was enough
to sanctify the white imagination
and call it holy. Most
were left doom-scrolling
Revelations, screenshotting scriptures
as if posting a psalm
could save the attention
span we buried
last decade. Divinity
gave way to data
when silicon valley cracked
the nation and the new gospel
we deemed intelligent
cried out in hunger.
Slop-fed on the living dead,
it ate itself as prophecy predicted.
But the beast
had already been crowned king
as we rallied the streets
watching the muted screams
of our children livestreamed.
Bios
jaamil olawale kosoko - Concept, Creative and Movement Director, Writer, Scenic and Costume Designer
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. In 2026, kosoko was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Philip Errico - Costume & Wardrobe Supervisor
Philip Errico is a performing artist, musician, and visual storyteller from Queens, New York. Their work draws from the tedium of suburban and city life, internet identities, technological dependency, addiction, and their detrimental effects on the psyche. Errico’s work is interested in internal fantasy arising from overstimulation, isolation, and the friction between these inner and outer worlds. Their practice extracts lived experience into immersive, cross-disciplinary work that treats emotion like raw material: compressed, overheated, and occasionally volatile. Moving fluidly between sound, performance, moving image, and spatial installation, Errico examines how bodies navigate environments on the edge of exhaustion and collapse. Their work often blurs boundaries between audience and performer, ritual and chaos, growth and decay. Discomfort functions not as an obstacle, but as an entry point– - a way of paying attention.
Jordan Deal - Video Designer
Jordan Deal (they/them) works in the intersections of performance, sound, installation, film, and text where the body becomes both instrument, interruption, and subterranean conduit. Channeling what they call chaos force—a method of embodied subversion—Deal unravels the mythologies and socio-political systems that choreograph public and private life. Their work has been presented internationally at prominent venues such as Cafe OTO (London), Radialsystem (Berlin, CTM Festival), Judson Memorial Church (NYC), Center for Performance Research (NYC), and Vox Populi (PHL). As a 2024 MAP Fund grantee, 2023–24 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and a 2022 research fellow at the Amant Foundation, Deal continues to experiment with black queer futurity, worldbuilding, and the unruly poetics of love & slickness.
Mawu Ama Ma’at Gora - Performer
Mawu Ama Ma’at Gora (they/them) is a Brooklyn native currently residing in Philadelphia. As a black, queer, Caribbean and transdisciplinary artist their movement practice is about food– sustenance, ceremony and storytelling. A graduate of Georgian Court University (BA) and Temple University (MFA). As a freelance artist they have collaborated with Cardell Dance Theater, Big Dance Theater and Jupiter Performance Studios. As an educator and dance scholar working with students at Bryn Mawr College has been inspiring. They are founder and director of the project-based company, Ma’at Works Dance Collective and adjunct professor at Bryn Mawr College. They are currently working with KosokoPerformance Studios, working on, //shrouded\\. Stay updated on new happenings on their website www.mawuniverse.com.
su güzey - Production Manager / Lighting Designer (Icebox)
su güzey is an Istanbul-born artist, designer, performer, producer and manager based in Philadelphia. they are a Fulbright Scholar and an Aerowaves Twenty21 choreographer, and have performed their own choreographies and collaborated with many international artists around the world such as Aakash Odedra Company, Jerome Bel, La Fura Dels Baus, Willi Dorner, Ann Van Den Broek, Anton Lachky, Helder Seabra and many more. they have worked as a director/producer in festivals in Istanbul and Philadelphia, and taught at the University of the Arts Philadelphia until its closure. Moving between research, design and execution, they aim to provoke processes of errantry, questioning how bodies, energies, and environments negotiate meaning and motion in times of instability, and how negotiation operates in malleable forms in conversation with/alongside an evolving phenomenology of the human.
Kingsley Ibeneche - Co-Director/ Performer / Musician
Kingsley UGŪM Ibeneche is a professional dancer/ choreographer, singer-songwriter/DJ, and professor by way of Nigeria, based in Camden, NJ. His work explores afro-collectivism as it relates to House music/dance, Afro folklore as code, and sacred gathering.
Black Maij - Performer / Cellist
Black Maij is a multidisciplinary movement artist and designer whose practice navigates the intersections of Black ancestral memory, sculptural form, and contemporary performance. As a celebrant in //shrouded\\, Maij contributes a rigorous embodied inquiry into how the body functions as a living archive of memory and transformation. Their work often explores the tactile and textural, aligning with the project’s poetics of opacity and the strategic use of concealment as a form of agency. A vital co-conspirator in world-building, Maij uses movement to bridge the gap between historical displacement and future emergence. Their presence in the ensemble reinforces a commitment to an infrastructure of care and the magnificent persistence of Black life beneath the "cloak of Blackness". Through a lens of radical imagination, they continue to archive the unseen and transform memory into motion.
Connor Sale - Lighting Designer (Lincoln Center)
Connor Sale is a Brooklyn-based Lighting Designer and the Resident Lighting Designer of Triskelion Arts. Recent collaborations include: The Closties Variety Hour; Farewell My Fool; til infiniti; The Suite; to begin with no end; ENUF (Triskelion Arts), The Missing Fruit, Part 1 (New York City Center/Fall For Dance), Das Ersatz (The Brick), Das Rauschgift (Box of Moonlight), MEOW! (Exponential Festival), With Tears (BEAMS), Femenine (PS21), the body || dust (Gibney), But, Soft (PAGEANT), and Sea Change (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). He’s toured internationally with Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (École des Sables/Sadler’s Wells co-production), Akram Khan’s Gigenis, and Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. He’s interested in using the temporary nature of light to make people more active in space. More of his work can be found at connorsale.com and at @connorsalelight.
Everett Asis Saunders - Sound Designer/ Composer/ Musician
Everett Asis Saunders is a multidisciplinary sound artist, composer, and audio engineer whose practice centers on the creation of immersive and site-responsive sonic environments. As the Sound Designer, Composer, and a celebrant in //shrouded\\, Saunders translates the work’s radical inquiries into a layered sonic ritual that explores the body’s relationship to memory and resistance. Their contribution includes the development of complex Pidgin scores, utilizing sound as a technology of reactivation to bridge seen and unseen worlds. A vital co-conspirator in world-building, Saunders’ work establishes the atmospheric threshold for the project's poetics of opacity, allowing the audience to navigate a communal field of remembrance through duration rather than counts. Their practice reinforces an ongoing commitment to an infrastructure of care, ensuring the archive is held with sonic integrity and radical imagination.
Cory M. Seals - Stage Manager
Cory M. Seals is an interdisciplinary artist and community curator born in Atlanta, GA and based in Philadelphia, PA. Seals’ motivation is to use movement and sound to create a landscape of improvisational practices, promiscuous futuring, and emergent strategy towards collective action, radical care, and illuminating the diversely interconnected experiences of black and queer people. Seals’ interdisciplinary work seeks to identify restorative frameworks for self and community care through illuminating histories of black queer desire as embodied research and meditative/explorative/exhibitive performance. His practices include vocal activations through song and speech, sonic landscape, prose and poetic writing, movement, and improvisation with voice, text, and movement. With projects ranging from experimental live performance to archive design— Seals devises fantastical and functional tools for black queer futurity. Cory regularly works with other artists and community members in performance, design, archival, and administration, bridging artistic practice with practical world building.
song aziza tucker - Performer
song aziza tucker (she/her) is a project based movement and writing artist whose works have spiraled out of her love for Black femmes, music, and poetry. song is wrapped up in the erotic, cathartic, and beautiful reflections of black femme aliveness and survivalhood. She obtained both her BFA and MFA degrees respectively at the University of the Arts under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield. Alongside her research, song has had the pleasure of working as a performer and collaborator with Mark Caserta, Tommie-Waheed Evans, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Ogemdi Ude, jaamil olawale kosoko, Jordan Lloyd, Niall Jones, Doug Varone, Jesse Zaritt, and Abby Zbikowski among others. Through all collaboration, song desires and commands a full pronouncement of a voluminous self impelled by black femme strategies in research and lived practice.
Kosoko Performance Studio
Amy Smith - Business and Finance Manager
Gretchen LaMotte - Grants & Donors Relations Manager
Brian Bacong - Virtual Assistant
SHOWSHOW
Jenni Bowman - Founder & Creative Producer
Melissa Kievman - Creative Producer
Jason Goodman - Associate Producer
Reba Gazdik - Administrative & Operations Consultant
Support
//shrouded\\ was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and additional artist support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Lincoln Center, Bogliasco Center in Italy, Shadowcliff Artist Residency, The New School, Cannonball Festival, ShowShow, and friends of kosoko performance studio.
This living structure extends beyond the performance.
It requires material support to remain intact.
This is not a gesture of charity.
It is an entry point into the system.
To contribute is to:
Support artist-centered infrastructure
Invest in care as a working model
Participate in the preservation of embodied archives
You are not funding a project.
You are reinforcing a condition where this practice can continue to exist.
Co-conspiracy is ongoing.
With deep gratitude to our Kickstarter Backers:
Stefan Ellis, Adam Peditto, Barb Watson, Gillian Fallon, Michael Lonergan, Wythe Marschall, Jef Michiels, Syreeta McFadden, ArKtype/Thomas O. Kriegsmann, Nicholas Croft, Wayne Ashley, Deborah Thomas, James Doolittle, Adam Peditto, & Sydney Stewart.
Participation as Support
The Radical Inquiry
What does it mean to live inside a Black inheritance?
This is not a question to be answered. But rather a condition to be entered.
You are not positioned outside the work.
You are already inside its field.
Your looking is not neutral.
Your presence is not passive.
To witness here is to participate in the redistribution of attention, care, and risk.
Body as Archive
//shrouded\\ operates on a fundamental premise: the body does not represent history. It carries it.
Memory is activated.
Lineage is transmitted.
The performers move within accumulations of lived and inherited experience shaped by Black queer temporalities.
Time folds. Past and present co-exist without resolution.
The body becomes a memory in motion.
A Living System of Practice
This work is constituted through relation.
Roles points of responsibility within a shared ecology.
Each contributor operates as both specialist and steward, holding the conditions that allow the work to exist, shift, and endure.