"Dust" Performance with Kevin Beasley, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, and Okwui Okpokwasili
Date: Friday, July 7, 2023
Time: 6PM
Location: 420 South Theresa Avenue, St. Louis, MO, 63103
Details:
This performance will be held near the (imagined) site of Josephine Baker's childhood home. (Her home, among many, was included in the demolition of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood.)
Ralph Lemon is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist who generates interdisciplinary modes of artistic expression as he strives to communicate stories, emotions, memories, and identities that do not conform to standard categories of representation. He incorporates sensibilities and approaches gleaned from endeavors beyond the arts, such as ethnographic and historical research, into a diverse and complex body of work that includes choreography, books, paintings, and experimental stage and lecture performances. Lemon’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Hayward Gallery in London, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and more. Lemon was a 2013-14 Annenberg Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from The College for Creative Studies, Detroit in 2007 and his MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2012. Beasley’s practice spans sculpture, photography, sound, and performance, while centering on materials of cultural and personal significance, from raw cotton harvested from his family’s property in Virginia to sounds gathered using contact microphones. Beasley alters, casts, and molds these diverse materials to form a body of works that acknowledge the complex, shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories.
Darrell Jones has performed with a variety of choreographers and companies such as Bebe Miller, Urban Bush Women, Min Tanaka and Ralph Lemon. Darrell is presently an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago. His classes are informed by his studies in a variety of contemporary dance techniques and improvisational processes.
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work.
