JAM Performance Festival: An Enchantment, Celebration, and Elegy

A wave of ocean-blue fabric ushered in a set change and shift to the musical portion of the evening, in which Rogers’s siren songs were accompanied by Jason Hwang on violin and Brandon Ross on guitar and banjo. Rogers sang, riding just below the note as her voice filled the space, teetering between sorrow and pleasure. Songs like “How’d You Get Your Teeth So White?” conveyed the pain and absurdity of racism, with lyrics like “Are you from Africa? / With a complexion like that / you’re not really Black, are you?” Rogers’s set also included covers of Talking Heads’ “Heaven” (“Heaven is a place / where nothing / nothing ever happens” is a philosophical treatise we are still pondering) and “Weeping Mary,” a song written by composer Matthew Petty. The latter title references both a town in Texas incorporated by freed slaves who had their land stolen by white people, and the biblical narrative of Mary Magdalene crying at Jesus’s tomb. It was first recorded by Rogers and Petty in 2018. Rogers returned to the recording in 2020, linking the historic references to the sorrow and grief amid the COVID-19 epidemic and the murder of George Floyd. Moving from grief to transcendence and back again over the course of the evening, Rogers’s performance closed with “Lightning in the Clear Blue Sky,” dispersing Early, Topsy-Turvy, and Just Above Midtown into the air as she bid the audience and her dream world goodnight.

The Conductions were at once a celebration and an elegy to Tate, Morris, and so many others. Guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer sang, “The best things in life are free / But you can give them to the birds and bees / I need money (That’s what I want)” as VJ Allison Costa projected images of JAM archival bills. Brandee Younger’s solo rendition of the “Black National Anthem” morphed into BSAC’s timely take on Burt Bacharach’s “Anyone Who Ever Had a Heart.” The evening performances transported each audience member through an improvised sonic songbook in which, according to BSAC, “no song is ever sung the same way once.”

Opening each performance, Reid called out “Burnt Sugar Arkestra” and the band members responded with “Yeah!” He repeated the call and BSAC’s response came quicker and with more fervor—then Vernon turned to the audience and shouted “MoMA.” There were a few murmurs before the audience caught the rhythm. The call and response bonded the audience and performers in a circle of togetherness so tightly knit that, after the last performance, Linda Goode Bryant remarked, “The ancestors showed up and they don’t seem like they’ll be going anywhere anytime soon.”

Tying & Un-Tying, a collaboration between Senga Nengudi Fittz and Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, is an ode to their years of shared conversation, inspiration, and citizenship in the virtual country of Bulemia. Founded in 1988, Bulemia was conceptualized by artist Charles Abramson and a community of creatives as “not a disease but a state of mind used as a metaphor for exploring the nature of creativity.” Bulemia took over the Kravis Studio, in a ritual with TwoTrees and Nengudi Fittz each exploring transformation through sound and movement in their “Imagi-Nation.” Its play on words offered a method for assembly and mixture without consumption. Much like JAM, Bulemia was a way to insist on Black cosmologies.

Nengudi Fittz and TwoTrees met at JAM in the 1980s, but this is their first collaboration. Nengudi Fittz had her first solo New York exhibition at JAM and later participated in performance collaborations with Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris and Cheryl Banks-Smith, and with Yasunao Tone and Blondell Cummings. Likewise, TwoTrees performed at the gallery in several works, including and he had six sisters…—a performance inspired by her friendship with David Hammons and the work of Zora Neale Hurston.