projects
riot space (coming October 2023)...
is a performance-installation (in partnership with Durham Main Library) centering Durham’s Black queer history in image, digital media, and sound. The
installation, a collection of animated GIF images created from archival recordings, will occupy the library's interactive touch screen at the center of the grand staircase. The exhibit will also feature three live sound performances by glitterboiwonder (Majesty Royale-Jackson) made up of archival sound sources, music samples, and recordings from everyday life in Durham.
As a Black Seminole, queer, gender non-conforming, descendant of Durham, Majesty has a special interest in the intersectionality implicated in definitions of “Blackness” and “queerness”. In this project they seek to provide a kind of representation that moves. The instability of the GIF’s movement lends itself as a frame for the uncapturable: a queerness.
"Queerness" as not only about sexuality or gender, “but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” (bell hooks).
the space between the riot and i (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.