projects
current
Poetics of the Apocalypse
in development
is a developing performance engaging movement, image, and sound to speculate on what may survive and be created through an already present apocalypse. It is interested in stretching the understandings of what Black spiritual practice is and how it can be a means of crossing between worlds or surviving the end of one. It moves with cultural products of past apocalypses, namely: the Atlantic slave trade & Indigenous genocides in what would become the US southeast. "Poetics..." uses the remnants of house music, the praise break, southern hip hop, folk lore, and ritual dances as material for navigating a dark, watery terrain between here and there. In this place, songs like “Swag Surfin”, become a seafaring lament, “Wipe Me Down”, a prescriptive hymnal, as we pass through death and into possibility.
It begins how it ends, in the basement of a church. A being snakes through the dark, voice first; “Ain’t the body where we make the world? Daddy? Daddy? Ain’t the body where we make the world?”
development residencies:
Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2024
Performing Arts Forum, 2022
in-progress experiments:
Unknowable (Play Church), 2024
Meshroom (Duke Arts), 2023
soft riot radio...
currently unfolding
is a science fiction radio series at the end of the world (which world is to be determined). It takes the perspective of a character who becomes a radio dj in a nameless, timeless post-apocalyptic scenario, broadcasting to an audience that may or may not exist. his/their incoherent memories, wandering desires, and sounds made up of the fragments of what the apocalypse has left behind, creates a poetic landscape for what might be on the other side of an ending.
This series is only available to my Patreon subscribers, starting at the "you think love isn't found on the radio?" tier.
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Untitled: through gritted teeth or smile for me, daddy
in development; to open November 2024, Greenville Museum Of Art
coming soon
past
riot space: installation and performance
Premier: 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.
Exhibitions & Performances
riot space (performance)- NC School of Science & Mathematics (2024, Durham, NC)
riot space: The World has ended... (installation)- The Arts Center (2024, Carrboro, NC)
riot space (performance) & riot space: the body (installation)- VAE Raleigh (2024, Raleigh, NC)
the space between the riot and i
Premier: 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 residency
collaborations
Della Can Fly
director; Jasmine Lynea
role; sound design
coming soon