OPEN STUDIOS | Maho Ogawa, Kate Williams, Rochelle Jamila, and AJ Wilmore, curated by mayfield brooks

mayfield brooks by Nir Arieli. Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can Purchase Tickets mayfield brooks curates OPEN STUDIOS, inviting Kate Williams, Maho Ogawa, Rochelle Jamila, and AJ Wilmore to present work from their unique practices and experiments in dance & performance. PROGRAM  Maho Ogawa: “Nothing to Watch” “Nothing to Watch” is a performance inspired by Japanese Tea Ritual and Zen meditation.  Featuring Carolyn Hall, Annie MingHao Wang, Emily Young, and Maho Ogawa. From Maho Ogawa: “In 2022, I began researching the Japanese Tea Ritual, visited Zen gardens and the historic Japanese Tea House, designed by the pioneer Tea Master, Sen-no Rikyu, in Kyoto. I then conducted a survey about people's daily rituals in New York to explore the connection between Japanese Tea / Zen culture and the local community in New York. Research and results from the survey, along with an overview of Japanese Tea Culture, and an interview with a Japanese Tea Master, were published as an online magazine, “a place where individuals become a whole,” by Culture Push. At CPR,  I'll invite dancers to experiment with incorporating the practice of Zen meditation into choreographic scores.” Kate Williams: Tender and Technical Featuring Reed Rushes and Iliana Penichet-Ramírez with Sound Design/Sound Mixing by Raphael Lelan-Cox. "She opens her eyes and sees…everything And she can’t believe it. In her head her voice sounds loud, but it’s barely coming through, or maybe it is but it’s hard for her to tell. She never got to say goodbye, and the feelings are starting to trickle through the cracks. Maybe she waved and just can’t remember.  Through hyper femininity, the overdramatization of mundaneness, and humor I explore the grief within myself and within connection. With two dancers joining me, they are wearing white morph suits in order to blend in with the background; it’s an illusion-there’s someone there, but also no one there.  I reach my hand out to… waiting………" Rochelle Jamila: it’s easy to be soft, like cotton In it's easy to be soft, like cotton Rochelle turns to her roots in the Mississippi delta to unravel and re-fabricate her relationship with cotton and cotton based textiles. The cotton plant has an over 5000 year history of cultivation and collaboration with humans, but for Black Americans with roots in the US South, cotton can evoke the traumas of enslavement, sharecropping, and Jim Crow. Rochelle channels the energy of this sacred plant, the Mother (Mississippi) River, and ancient textile practices to process this inherited dissonance and seek solace in cotton's soft  and wise medicine. AJ Wilmore: dolla party dolla party is an attempt to recall dances AJ did outside of (in)formal dance training and a peek into the practices they were building as a young girl growing up in Philly. It guides the viewer through a night of clubbing at 12 years old—an activity where pre-teens and teenagers would attend late-night “dolla parties” in various makeshif...