JAM Performance Festival: An Enchantment, Celebration, and Elegy
Artists jam out to celebrate Just Above Midtown gallery’s history—and to lay the groundwork for an inclusive future.
T. Jean Lax, Lilia Rocio Taboada
Apr 7, 2023
The gallery Just Above Midtown was a hub for performance across disciplines. JAM was also a performance unto itself: a 12-year durational artwork and living installation where people could gather, find refuge from a racist art world, and make work together. Which is just what we did in the final weeks of the retrospective exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces. Performances that began at JAM were reactivated at MoMA during the three-week JAM Performance Festival. Each week a new ensemble took the stage, passing along what they knew about JAM as an incubator for collaboration. Traces of this time together now manifest as the spirit of JAM, re-enlivened—and with a blueprint for how it might continue.
Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris Conduction® with Vernon Reid, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, and Special Guests, February 9, 2023
The Festival opened with Topsy-Turvy, a performance and installation by vocalist, dramatist, and playwright Alva Rogers. In what Rogers called her “hyper-surreal” world, three monumental dolls—Sarah, Early, and Mermaid—live in a farm soundscape composed by Dave Pascal, conjuring the antebellum plantations where the Black-on-one-side-white-on-the-other topsy-turvy dolls first came into being.
“Enchantment…prepares us for all that life will bring and lay at your feet,” says Rogers. As the stage transformed into a set for the evening performances, the enchantment of a puppet play and Rogers’s musical performance—with a musical score by Bruce Monroe—invited the viewer further into the world of the artist’s dreams. The play brought Sarah, Hannah, Early, and Mermaid to life in a scene in which Hannah—an enslaved person who works in the big house—gives her daughter, Early, a topsy-turvy doll, a way for young Early to imagine a place where children don’t grow up to be slaves, but instead become mermaids.
Installation space for the performance Alva Rogers: Topsy-Turvy, February 3–4, 2023
Alva Rogers: Topsy-Turvy, February 4, 2023
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 Black Rock Coalition (BRC) was born at Just Above Midtown Gallery’s Soho location, utilizing the space for rehearsals, gigs, and benefit bashes. Guitarist Vernon Reid, the cofounder of the BRC, met the writer/critic/lecturer/musician Gregory Stephen “Ionman” Tate (1957–2021) and musician/composer/conductor Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris (1947–2013) at JAM. On three consecutive nights at MoMA, Reid concocted a Fantasia-like, multimedia atmosphere. Each evening featured Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber (BSAC) and VJ Allison Costa alongside special guests James “Blood” Ulmer and David Barnes, DJ Logic and Beans, and Brandee Younger, all with Reid using Morris’s signature Conduction® system of hand and baton gestures. The MoMA edition of BSAC, the avant-garde musical family founded by Tate, consisted of Lisala Beatty, Shelley Nicole, Bruce Mack, Mazz Swift, Ms. Olithea, Lewis “Flip” Barnes, JS Williams, V. Jeffrey Smith, Dave “Smoota” Smith, Jason Tobias DiMatteo, Leon Gruenbaum, Ben Tyree, Shawn Banks, LaFrae Sci, Chris Eddleton, and Jared Michael Nickerson.
Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris Conduction® with Vernon Reid, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, and Special Guests, February 11, 2023
Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris Conduction® with Vernon Reid, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, and Special Guests, February 9, 2023
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.”
Senga Nengudi Fittz and Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees: Tying & Un-Tying, February 18, 2023
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.
Tying & Un-Tying opened with Nengudi Fittz’s film Bulemia Doublethink, documenting the citizens of the imaginary country, who include Charles Abramson, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and John Outterbridge. It was followed by the live streamed performance-collaboration across continents by TwoTrees from Mumbai and Nengudi Fittz from New York. Culminating in TwoTrees’ film Falling into Language, with a soundtrack by Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy and multiple voices bring the audience to a state “bigger than the transformation, more than even the light-a state of Oneness, charged with energy...” as evoked by Nengudi Fittz and TwoTrees during the performance. Tying & Un-Tying along with the other performances presented during the festival; “evoked the sweet tasting soul energizing JAM” that brought to life how JAM might be JAM at MoMA–pervasive in the air as a breath, an echo, and a call to those inside and outside of the space.
Senga Nengudi Fittz and Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees: Tying & Un-Tying. February 18, 2023.
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