Conversation, Performance

This performance has been cancelled.

Combining film projection with live performance, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? invites you to imagine a world in which the surreptitious worship of Black people in Western culture is profoundly and openly acknowledged. Where stadiums built in devotion to Black masculinity are recognized as cathedrals; Where the music we breathe into being, appropriated the moment it leaves our nostrils, falls from our tongues, is glorified as sacred vibration, as hymn; Where Black female bodies are imagined as the vehicle through which the world conceives of and actualizes its most creatively seductive vision of itself.

This collaborative and multi-media performance of film, sound and movement, marks a conversation within the YAMS collective in which they consider the consequences of erasure from the canon of the sacred. It’s a call to an intervention into the very architectures of the Divine and a contemplation on the relationship between canonical erasure and state sponsored terror and violence against the deeply mystical resilience, beauty, and movement of Black bodies.

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? is an evolving multi-disciplinary collective of artists from the African diaspora who have lived and worked together in various iterations over the past twenty years.