CORY SEALS
PERFORMANCE
Cory Seals uses his multidisciplinary practice as a means to bridge the gap between activism and art practice.Through his practices, he creates spaces of freedom and expression to embrace the fullness of his experience. By creating and curating he empowers others to live in their own fullness by creating more informed spaces to do so.
He is influenced by the wealth of cultural and spiritual knowledge that has been cultivated and preserved in the diasporic community. In doing so, he constructs sonic and somatic landscapes that invite the audience to join in the exploration of improvisation and conventions within the diverse communities of black and queer culture.
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. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?
PRESENTATIONS
April 2023 (WORLD PREMIERE), New York Live Arts
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.
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.
_DREAMZ_
//DREAMZ// is a short film that reaches for a more elevated/connected/transient/divine intervention through the receptor of our deep consciousness. The divine sends these signals through our crown and third eye chakras as breadcrumbs to our own edification in the past, present, and future. In this work I combine sonic, visual, and textual elements to theorize my own perception of our journey to and from the dreamscape.Using songs from r&b, jazz, and show tunes I construct a sonic dreamscape with ethereal synths of Solange, floaty melody of the Pied Pipers, and a transcendent excerpt from Brad Mehldau. Visually I use motifs in movement as I repeatedly symbolize my third eye with hand shapes and the synthesis of the divine through my interaction with a floating mask from South Africa, personifying my ancestors. Transient communions with the divine and deciphered maps for the physical plane.