SOCIAL HEALTH PERFORMANCE CLUB: Dark Diction

January 16 - 17, 2015

The Brooklyn-based performance art group Social Health Performance Club brings nine performance artists to JACK with works that investigate resistances, regulations, and relationships between public speech, vocabularies of image and symbol, diction, and construction of identity. The two evenings are curated and organized by Ayana Evans, Esther Neff, and Elizabeth Lamb, who will also be performing framing texts and raising questions as emcees throughout the two nights.

Part of JACK's season-long series Forward Ferguson.

THE LINE-UP:

FRIDAY, January 16, 7:30-10:30pm
Nyugen Smith
Lorene Bouboushian
Ian DeLeon
Ivy Castellanos
Preach R. Sun (installation)

SATURDAY, January 17, 7:30-10:30pm
Whitney Hunter
Maria Hupfield
Mary Valverde and Leyna Marika Papach
Geraldo Mercado
Preach R. Sun (installation)
Rafael Sanchez

The term "dark diction" is taken from Kanye West's Crack Music and describes an optimistic vision of empowerment through speech that would give the oppressed a way to express their identity and reshape reality around them. But since West sees wealth and power as the only way to freedom within current paradigms, such speech is dangerously reduced to a commodity supporting the political and economic status quo. DARK DICTION addresses this paradox, asking: how free are our very forms of speech (diction)? How does speech become empowered?

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