projects
riot space: installation and performance
Durham Main Library, October 2023
"riot space" is a performance & installation exploring embodiments of Blackness and queerness through investigating Durham’s Black archives. The installation, a 2-channel video projection on hanging mirror panels, are a collection of loops layered in conversation with the artist's body accompanied by an original sound score made up of distorted music fragments, an improvised sermon, and oral history archives.
Three performances take place alongside the installation, tracing a path from the center of downtown Durham and arriving at the library, the performances seeks to re-embody, trace, and call out to memory through a movement score inspired by the video loops and an expanded sound score performed live.
the space between the riot and i
New York Live Arts, April 2022
investigates alternative modes of existence, memory, and ghostly inhabitance through challenging the physical body and sensorial experience to rigorous transformation. It emerges out of the world of post-ecstatic experience. Who and where are you when the glitter settles and the dance floor is sticky with the sugars of the night before? “the space between the riot and I” is a solo performed by Majesty Royale that uses movement and sound to challenge the continuity of our reality and the stakes implicated by our existences. The material moves through the logic of the dream: altered speed, distorted pitch, relocation, and spontaneous change. As the work seeks to challenge the assumptions of our reality, so does it challenge the structure of the theatre by mis-occupying the space. Majesty takes on the world with new logics, transforming the possibilities of the world we know and oneself in it. Through these practices, Majesty moves toward a fantasy, a fiction, a friction, a fault, a fumbling, a flying.
(commissioned by New York Live Arts, Fresh Tracks)
soft riot radio... (in progress)
is an internet radio station emerging out of the world of post-ecstatic experience: who are you when the glitter settles, the make-up has run, the dance floor is sticky with the sugars of the night before? When the fantasies of self-importance have faded, this is the soundtrack of questions, wishes, memories, and dreams that dance between ears. The matter of this landscape is made up of remnants of love ballads, disco classics, r&b standards, and gospel which move into complex relationships, trying to make them reveal the life they hide.