Selina Thompson, Pat It and Prick It and Mark It With B,.2013. Photo by Pari Naderi
Tickets are free; register here.
Selina Thompson: SUPA DUPA FLY
Nia O. Witherspoon: Priestess of Twerk
Angel Rose: Excesstentialism
Selina Thompson: SUPA DUPA FLY
20 minutes on Decadence and the fat Black female body; 20 minutes on Decadence and the skinny white influencer; 20 minutes on Decadence at the end of the world; 20 minutes on Decadence and Tommie Lee eating Cup Noodles on the cover art for Bad and Boujee; 20 minutes on Decadence for teenage girls with no money; 20 minutes on The ongoing decadence of the Black Imaginary; 20 minutes on Decadence and the potential to separate it from Capitalism (spoiler: not sure you can); 20 minutes on Decadence and Missy Elliott; 20 minutes on Decadence in the 00s vs Decadence in the 10s; 20 minutes on Decadence reshaped by Covid 19 as we head into the 20s; 20 minutes on Decadence on the back of a bus; 20 minutes on Decadence and Equity; 20 minutes on Decadence and freedom; 20 minutes on Decadence and its place – or lack thereof – in emancipatory politics.
Selina Thompson is an artist and writer whose work has been shown and praised internationally. Her practice is intimate, political and participatory with a strong emphasis on public engagement, which leads to provocative and highly visual work that seeks to connect with those historically excluded by the arts. Selina’s work is currently focused on the politics of marginalisation, and how this comes to define our bodies, relationships and environments. She has made work for pubs, hairdressers, toilets, and sometimes even galleries and theatres, including BBC Radio, the National Theatre Studio and The National Theatre of Scotland as well as theatres across the UK, Europe, Brazil, North America and Australia. She was featured in The Stage 100 Most Influential Leaders 2018, awarded the Forced Entertainment Award in 2019, and her work Salt was named one of the riskiest of the century by BBC Front Row in 2020. Check out her Interview with Staging Decadence here.
Nia O. Witherspoon: Priestess of Twerk
Priestess of Twerk (2020-21) is a piece that explores what sex work, reproductive justice and trans-rights movements have to teach us about our relationship to the erotic and to our bodies in the 21st century. We explore ancient Egyptian archives, Sumerian myths, and aesthetics of decadence inside a contemporary Black feminist politic to create an experience that spans from individual and collective ritual to watching a play, live concert, and sermon. This presentation will explore the dramaturgy and inspiration going into creating Priestess of Twerk, including the building out of the contemporary character of Isis through a rap-alter ego, and the beginnings of visualizing how space will be organized inside the piece.
Nia Ostrow Witherspoon is a Black Queer theatre maker, vocalist and composer, and cultural worker investigating the metaphysics of Black liberation, desire, and diaspora. She is the Multimedia Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, a Creative Capital Awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, an artist in residence at HERE Arts Center and BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and was a 2017-18 2050 Playwriting/Directing Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop. Witherspoon has held tenure-track professorships at Florida State University and Arizona State University, has published in numerous journals and collections, and is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Nation in the Dark: A Black femme spell for justice.
Angel Rose: Excesstentialism
Angel Rose will present her essay ‘Excesstentialism’, extracted from her recently published zine Serious Fun 2: Serious Fun, Seriously (2020). The character of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde (2001) is used to interrogate the binary between seriousness and fun, the false neutrality of white paper, and the philosophical possibility of true contradiction. The wider implications of essentialism in a Covid world are examined, in order to ultimately propose the essential nature of excess: Excesstentialism.
Angel Rose is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, writing, video, and printed media. In 2015 she earned a Masters in Performance and Visual Practice from the University of Brighton. Her work has been exhibited internationally and shown in spaces such as Centre Pompidou, Somerset House, The ICA, and The British Film Institute. Her first solo show, Sick Bag, was presented in 2016 at the Residence Gallery in London. She has presented research and taught at institutions such as Central St Martins, NYU and Columbia University. She currently lives in Hastings, where she teaches art history and theory at University Centre Hastings.
This event is part of a series, 'Staging Decadence', co-hosted by The Decadence Research Centre and Staging Decadence.
Kindly sponsored by the Decadence Research Centre, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.