Daniel alexander jones curates

December 4-7, 2013

JACK invites the inimitable artist and performer Daniel Alexander Jones to curate a week of performances at JACK. Below is the line-up, a mixture of music, performance and poetry:

Wednesday, Dec. 4th at 8 pm:
Stacey Karen Robinson: Quiet Frenzy

Thursday, Dec. 5th at 8 pm:
Radha Blank: The 40-year Old Version (mixtape)

Friday, Dec. 6th at 8 pm:
Will Davis, Dawn Akemi Saito and Rhonda Ross

Saturday, Dec. 7th at 8 pm:
Light in the Darkness: A reflection on the Spiritual
Featuring Helga Davis, Pamela Sneed, Eisa Davis, Gale Jackson, Eder J. Williams, Imani Uzuri and hosted by Jomama Jones

Stacey Karen Robinson: Quiet Frenzy
Quiet Frenzy is a solo show about the explosion, dispersion and reintegration of a life devastated by loss. Still reeling from the sudden death of her twin sister,LaShonda wanders into a crack of time where strangers, spirits, memory and magic collide. She descends into her depths and out of her boundaries. She rises from trauma and recollects her Self.

An Evening with Radha Blank:
The 40-Year-Old Version (Mixtape)
A down-on-her-luck playwright, after choking a white theater producer, finds her career as a playwright in the toilet. She reinvents herself as rapper RadhaMUSprime, The Forty-Year-Old Version. Woody Allen meets Ghost Face Killer.

Radha Blank is a playwright whose work includes American Schemes, seed, HappyFlowerNail, nannyland, Casket Sharp, Reverb and Kenya. Awards and fellowships include New Professional Theatre’s Writers Award, NYFA Fellowship, Nickelodeon’s Writers Fellowship, The Public Theaters Emerging Writers Group and the 2011 Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting.

Will Davis, Dawn Akemi Saito, Rhonda Ross
An evening of short works by stellar artists
Will Davis: THE BOY FROM THE CIRCUS | A love letter to William Inge
Dawn Akemi Saito: SUNS ARE SUNS | an impressionistic solo theatre piece sharing first-person accounts of sex trafficking and incorporating the ghostly art of Butoh dance
Rhonda Ross: RELATIVITY | Anaila, a college senior, searches for herself in the face of many trials

Dawn Akemi Saito is an actress, writer, and Butoh performer. Her multi-disciplinary work as well as her collaborations with major innovative artists have been seen across the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

Rhonda Ross, daughter of the legendary songstress, Diana Ross and Motown founder Berry Gordy, is a writer, vocalist and an actress. Her most famous acting credit is on “Another World,” as Toni Burrell. She played the role from 1997 to 1999 and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award. A graduate of Brown University, she is married to jazz musician Rodney Kendrick, and together their most recent albums are top sellers on CDbaby.com and other music sites.

Will Davis is a transgender theatre maker focused on new and devised work. Also a performer, Will has worked with The New Harmony Project, Salvage Vanguard Theatre and The Duplicates. Other recent work includes: THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE which received both Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Direction awards by the Austin Critics Table Awards. Lisa D’Amour’s THE CATARACT, THE BOY FROM THE CIRCUS, a devised ghost play for William Inge, and COLOSSAL, a new play about football and feats of strength scored with a live drum line, and also nominated for Outstanding Drama by the Austin Critics Table Awards.

Light in the Darkness:
A reflection on the Spiritual
Hosted by Jomama Jones and featuring performances by:

Eisa Davis was the 2012 Alpert Award winner in Theatre and a 2013 Obie Award winner for Sustained Excellence in Performance. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Bulrusher, and wrote and starred in Angela’s Mixtape, named a best of 2009 by The New Yorker. Her most recent work is a music-theatre piece commissioned by Symphony Space, Flowers Are Sleeping. Eisa was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award, and the Whitfield Cook Award, among others. As an actor, recent theatre work includes Luck of the Irish at LCT3 (Lucille Lortel nomination), the world premieres of The Call and This at Playwrights Horizons, and her Obie Award-winning performance in the Broadway rock musical Passing Strange, captured on film by Spike Lee. Eisa is featured in the films Free Angela, Welcome to the Rileys, Robot Stories, The Architect, Confess, Happenstance, Pretty Bird, Apparition of the Eternal Church, Brass Tacks, In The Family, The Letter, Jack Ryan and The Volunteer (upcoming). She was Bubbles’ sister on The Wire, has guest starred on Damages and Soul Food, and recurred on Smash and Hart of Dixie. As a singer-songwriter, her album Something Else is available through iTunes and CDBaby.

Helga Davis is a principal actor in the 25th anniversary re-staging of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's seminal work Einstein on the Beach. In 2012, Ms. Davis appeared twice in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, in both Einstein on the Beach and Maya Beiser's Elsewhere with music by Missy Mazzoli. She will have her second appearance at the Barbican in 2012 when she returns in May to star in an opera written for her by Paola Prestini, Oceanic Verses, with libretto by Donna DiNovelli and video by Ali Houssani (Voom Portraits, Robert Wilson). After London, Ms. Davis will travel in the summer of 2013 to Antwerp and Hamburg to work on a new opera by Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) with libretto by Andrew Ondrejcak. Ms. Davis’s past work has included The Blue Planet (2008), a multi-media theater piece written by Peter Greenaway and directed by Saskia Boddeke, and was co-star in The Temptation of St. Anthony directed by Robert Wilson, with libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock. In February 2008, Davis conducted a special feature interview with artist Kara Walker for the WNYC program Morning Edition on the eve of Ms. Walker’s Whitney Museum retrospective.

Vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri is an eclectic artist who travels internationally from Morocco to Moscow creating and performing in world class venues across various genres including concerts, recordings, experimental theater, performance art and sound installations. Uzuri’s work has been called “stunning” by New York Magazine and incorporates her interests in world culture, experimentation and sacred music. She has earned critical acclaim for her debut album, Her Holy Water: A Black Girl’s Rock Opera as well as for her collaborations with diverse artists such as Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Wangechi Mutu, Sandford Biggers and Vijay Iyer. The Village Voices says, “With a voice that would sound equally at home on an opera stage or a disco 12-inch, Imani Uzuri is a constant surprise…seamlessly combining jazz, classical, country and blues motifs into highly personalized compositions.” Uzuri’s new album, The Gypsy Diaries, draws on her rural Southern roots as well as influences ranging from Sufi devotionals to Romany laments and features sitar, acoustic guitar, cello, violin, Japanese shinobue flute and world percussion. It is a vibrant lyrical and spiritual soundscape that was named #2 on Rhapsody’s World Top 10 List Summer 2012. Uzuri is currently composing a new musical GIRL Shakes Lose Her Skin that she is developing with playwright Zakiyyah Alexander inspired by the works of Philadelphia Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez. “Uzuri never fails to mesmerize audiences with her narcotic blend of…ethereal sounds” (Time Out New York)

Gale Jackson currently serves as a teaching artist, assistant professor and resident storyteller on the faculties of Eugene Lang College, and The Hayground School. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for her work in African American history and the Griot tradition. Publications include the books Khoisan Tale and Bridge Suite: Narrative Poems Based on the Lives of African and African American Women in the Early History of These Black Nations. (Storm Imprints, 1998); the novella "Medea"; We Stand Our Ground: Three Women, Their Poetry, Their Politics, a collaborative book with Kimiko Hahn and Susan Sherman (Ikon Press, 1988); and co-editor of Art Against Apartheid: Works for Freedom (Ikon Press, 1986).

Eder J. Williams McKnight teaches in the Urban Core. She is a native Atlantan, but also has called Mmabatho, South Africa; Albuquerque, NM; and Harlem, NY home. She arrived to CITYterm after working at The Westminster Schools (Atlanta) where she taught English and an interdisciplinary course. There, she also directed an exchange program between Westminster and Mount Kenya Academy, an independent school in Nyeri, Kenya. In the summers, she is one of the lead teachers for the Klingenstein Summer Institute, a program of the Klingenstein Institute of Teachers College, Columbia University. Her formal studies have led to an A.B in International Relations from Brown University, an M.A. in English Literature from The Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College, and an Ed.M in Educational Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she was a Klingenstein Fellow. Currently, Eder is working on an MFA in poetry through the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing, a low residency program at the University of Southern Maine.

Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, performer, writer and actress whose work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Source, Time Out, Bomb, Next, MetroSource, Blue, VIBE, HX, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery,and of Kong & Other Works, and has performed for sold out houses at Lincoln Center, Creative Time@ The Brooklyn Anchorage, The Studio Museum, Exit Art, PS. 122, The ICA London, Joe’s Pub/Public Theater and many more. In 1998, Sneed was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and is a recipient of the 2006 Baxten Award For Performance, a Franklin Furnace Award, two Joyce-Mertz Gilmore Commissions for P.S.122 and a 6 week residency at the corporation of Yaddo. An adjunct associate professor of Speech, Communication and Theater at Long Island University and also a visiting professor in the Core Seminar department, she holds a 2008 M.F.A in New Media Art and Performance. Her work has been seen in The 100 Best African American Poems (edited by Nikki Giovanni), To Be Left With the Body, The Best American Plays 2005-6,and Brown Sugar: An anthology of Black Erotica. Pamela Sneed will be working with Tommy Pico on his chapbook, It’s All Happening, Man, to be released in three different intervals over the course of the mentorship, focusing on the poet’s experiences of the intersection between his distinct gay and Native American identities.

Daniel Alexander Jones is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist. American Theatre Magazine named him one of fifteen artists whose work would “change American stages for decades to come.” He is the recipient of the prestigious Alpert Award in the Arts in Theatre for 2006. His theatre pieces include Jomama Jones: Radiate, Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Earthbirths, Blood:Shock:Boogie and Cab and Lena. Daniel has performed nationally in numerous cities including New York, Minneapolis, Austin, St. Paul, Seattle and Boston and internationally in London, Dublin, Manchester and Leeds. Jones is the recipient of support from The Rockefeller Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and TCG, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Howard Foundation and The Jerome Foundation. Daniel is a faculty member with Goddard College’s Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts and has been an Adjunct Faculty member with The Department of Theatre and Dance since 2004. A native of Massachusetts, Daniel splits his time between Austin and New York City.