“Improvising While Black” Performance and Artist Talk from Mayfield Brooks
Phoenix Center for the Arts
September 7
8:00 pm
“Improvising While Black” is an interdisciplinary dance project and dance improvisation experiment. The seed for IWB sprouted out of brooks’s personal experience of being racially profiled when driving while black/DWB in San Francisco, California. The project is a multifaceted inquiry into spontaneous movement creation, racial representation, and survival, and lives in “the wreck” of collective dreams and desires for some kind of real or imagined future. IWB is also a series of Creative INterventions—e.g., a zine and community participation projects—that rupture settler colonial logic, anti-black violence, and other sites thatperpetuate industrial complex mentality. IWB finds futurity in the hustle, the fugitive, the ancestor, the queer outlaw, the flesh, and improvisatory modes of dance as resistance
mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based in brooklyn, new york. mayfield is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. they studied contemporary dance at the school for new dance (sndo) in amsterdam, moving on center in oakland, ca, and holds a mfa in interdisciplinary performance from uc davis and a masters in performance studies from northwestern university. mayfield is currently an artist in residence at movement research nyc, was a 2018 wow/uny artist in residence at governors island nyc, and a 2019 dance and process (dap) artist at the kitchen nyc.
The presentation will be an excerpt from the larger work “IWB” followed by an artist talk with mayfield brooks at the Phoenix Youth Hostel.
Cost $10 - $20 sliding scale
Please reserve tickets at: www.nuebox.org/events
Produced by NueBox, The Carpetbag Brigade, Performance in Borderlands and SOSH (Spirit of Sam Hill @ Prescott College)