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PERFORMANCE

My artistic practice exists at the intersection of movement, sound, and improvisation, where each gesture, note, and word forms a terrain where care, resistance, and futurity can be explored with slowness and intention. I approach my work as embodied research, where the body becomes both instrument and archive, echoing histories of Black queer desire that stretch across time, place, and memory.
 

Through voice, song, movement, and text, I explore relationality: with others, with the land, with time. I embrace improvisation as a practice of listening deeply to the present moment, allowing the future to unfurl. In this space, care becomes a revolutionary offering –care for the self, the community, the land we situate ourselves, for the ancestral and the emergent.
 

As I trace the intersections of Blackness and queerness, I engage in a practice of promiscuous futuring –imagining lives and worlds yet to be, one that resists the limitations imposed by historical erasure and invisibility. I seek to create restorative frameworks that move beyond the linearity of time, shaping spaces where collective action and radical care can emerge and flourish.
 

My projects range from experimental performance to archival design, all of which seek to generate tools for Black queer futurity that are both fantastical and functional, speculative and practical. These tools are not simply aesthetic, but serve as functional means to navigate and reshape the world –tools that promote visibility, care, and sustainability for Black and queer people. My practice, therefore, is not merely about performance but about the creation of new worlds where we are seen, heard, and understood in the full spectrum of our existence –past, present, and future.
This endeavor is one of continuous unfolding –an act of creating and re-creating, of listening, witnessing, and transforming together.

P(o/u)NK

P(o/u)NK is an exploration of black queer anarchism through movement and sound. Cory Seals presents a solo that wrestles with the fugitivity of black queer liveness to reckon with violent pasts and imagine liberated futures. P(O/U)NK uses movement and sound to create a landscape of improvisational practices/promiscuous futuring/emergent strategies towards dispelling shame associated with touch and illuminating a unified culture of black queer legacy. What does it mean to show affection, exhibit sensuality, and/or flirt with an imagination of a future with a loved one, or maybe someone you might/should/hope to love? How do you initiate that touch/kiss/grind/hug? Sustain it? When to let go? How do these initiations snowball into cultural practices? What does it do to form when we ossify it? In a Cisgender Heteronormative Christofascist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal society that mobilizes shame into systemic violence, how can identifying cultural practices in black social dance and queer intimacy illuminate legacy and further our understanding of consensual touch?

This research culminates as a series of meditations and rituals that utilize movement and sound derived from social dance, cruising culture, and contact improvisation (i really wanted to say nigga shit, butt stuff, and raging against the machine) to create a happening that invites participants to explore their relationship to touch and intimacy. P(O/U)NK bumps and grinds into a future of radical care using live sound, dance, and consent practices.​

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September 2024, Cannonball Festival, Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, PA

On Buried Ground

An immersive performance and exhibition reveal the histories of enslaved and freed people of African descent in Philadelphia during the American colonial era. Dance artist Shayla-Vie Jenkins and playwright Angela Bey develop an evening of theatrical storytelling, informed by new scholarship and archival records, including newly digitized records from sixteen early Philadelphia congregations. An exhibition of artifacts that inspired the performance, an interactive story map that visitors can contribute to, and public discussions with historians, artists, and archivists contextualize daily life for Black people in colonial America and foreground their roles in American history.​

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September 2024, Neighborhood House, Christ Church & Burial Ground, Philadelphia, PA

Oceanic Feeling

A durational ritual across a vast expanse of ocean shoreline, Faye Driscoll’s Oceanic Feeling charts the slow descent of 16 performers from the dunes and the sand to the water. Seemingly spreading into infinity, the performers - spaced evenly across an almost unseeable distance, enact a sustaining loop of breath and sculptural forms that thwart perspective and seem to tilt our sense of the line between sand and sky.

An epic accumulation over time funnels the ritual to the mouth of the water where bodies connect, laying themselves down at the altar of the ocean. Bodies collide and merge with each other, the sand, the salt, the licking waves, and eventually are enveloped by the womb of the water. A public art work that takes place throughout the three stages of twilight, until the horizon line begins to blur, sky and water becoming one, the public is invited to move with the performance from beach to shore.​

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August 2024, Beach Sessions, Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY

Weathering

Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects choreographed by Faye Driscoll. Ten people (dancers/singers/crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable.

 

PRESENTATIONS
Apr 2023 (WORLD PREMIERE), New York Live Arts, NYC, NY

Jan 2024, The Blackwood Gallery & Toronto Dance Theatre, Daniel's Spectrum, Toronto, Canada 

Feb 2024, Carolina Performing Arts, UNC Chapel Hill, NC

May 2024, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium

Jun 2024, Festival TransAmeriques, Montreal, Canada

Nov 2024, Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Portugal
Nov 2024, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Porto, Portugal
Nov 2024, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA

Feb 2025, REDCAT, CalArts, Los Angeles, CA

Apr 2025, OZ Arts, Nashville, TN
 

TELL EM WHAT YOU WANT

SOUNDS OF SPIRIT

Musicians Cory Seals & Khalib Owen perform a soundscape of traditional spirituals and sonic musings to conjure a continuum of African American presence as a dialogue with the Arthur Ross Gallery’s current exhibition John E. Dowell: Path To Freedom. SOUNDS OF SPIRIT is inspired by Dowell’s use of collage across disciplines and time lines in his prints and performances with the Visual Music Ensemble. As Dowell explicates the dichotomy of the beauty in African American culture and the soft, white fibers of cotton against the violent and painful history of chattel slavery, Seals & Owen expand traditional songs intended for field work and devotion with modern technology to reveal the divine play that is embedded within diasporic music. By dissecting ancestral strategies of survival with modern technology, afrofutures are crafted with the foundation of healing and prosperity. Seals & Owen compose a score using recordings, synthesizers, voice, and clarinet to transcend boundaries in rhythm and melody, collaging space and time in the likeness of John E. Dowell’s multitemporal work.

Pathways, Poetics and Play: The Embodied Traveler

The program invites students to experience urban Florence and the rural Tuscan village of La Filanda through interdisciplinary and immersive artistic practices by instigating all our senses through engaging site-specific visual, performance, and culinary experiences as improvisational languages to be played with and cultivated, honing and activating our instincts as traveling artists. Pathways, Poetics, and Play: The Embodied Traveler engages students in intimate, disruptive, and poetic dialogues with urban Florence and the rural Tuscan village of La Filanda devising Paths of Experience (POE): sensorial and site-specific performance art research and creations.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE

Choreographed by Ankhtra Battle in 2022 for University of the Arts Festival of Senior Works.

LOWCOUNTRY

Short film “Lowcountry” is presented as a quotidian interaction with the remnants of Gullah culture that still permeate the everyday lives of my family that was inspired by Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). My brief story of visiting my Granna and Grandaddy in Savannah feels like a far distanced effort to heed Nana Peazant’s command to hold on to the history and practice passed down from our ancestors in the motherland. I describe my return to the humid marshland that has shifted into a suburb called Georgetown in which my grandparents reside as an effort to maintain my connection with my lineage. The casual presentation of family gathering is intended to portray how deeply rooted our practices of communion are which mirrors the scene of the Peazant family’s final feast on the beach. The sound of rain echoes in the background to represent the significance of water in our history and emphasize the resilience of our culture despite the weathering elements of time. This recording was taken on the back porch told in the story and depicted in the image of the vase of cotton.

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Strength To Love (STL) is A Multi-Media Project Campaign Based on the same-titled book Strength to Love written by Martin Luther King Jr. STL project is a campaign that aims to encourage and uplift one another through our hardships and show our united front in fighting the battle against temporal and spiritual struggles like discrimination, mental health, financial hardship, etc. This project amplifies the voices of young artists who have found a new meaning to what love looks like in our present time. By following the raw experiences of these artists from different walks of life, we share our Global thoughts through Music, Art, and Our voices. Strength to Love comes as a wake-up call stating that love needs to be part of our daily lives in order to have the strength to love one another.

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