The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People

taisha paggett and WXPT in collaboration with Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a large-scale installation and performance platform by Los Angeles-based artist taisha paggett and WXPT in collaboration with Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe.

The DiverseWorks gallery will be set up as a rehearsal studio, photo shoot and experimental classroom, where The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People will be researching their ongoing question, “What is a Black dance curriculum today?” in the context of Houston. Convened in the memory of an erased Black school in East Texas, the School builds a curriculum that responds to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds, seeking new relationships and possibilities, freedoms and sovereign spaces. Through performances, workshops, and conversations, curriculum activities will include wanderings, gatherings, dispersions, the lifting of people, the staging of images and other embodied practices, developing scores to be taken out into different communities throughout Houston.

FREE PUBLIC CLASSES EVERY SATURDAY IN MAY, 1 – 5 PM

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People began as a conversation between taisha paggett, Rodney McMillian and Cauleen Smith. The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People was first presented at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) where it was curated by Robert Crouch and on view October 21 – December 16, 2015.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

taisha paggett’s work for the stage, gallery and public space includes individual and collaborative inquiries into the body, agency, and the phenomenology of race and gender. Her projects seek to expand upon the languages and frames of contemporary dance practices, and the limitations of the architecture of conventional dance spaces. Her works include solo and ensemble performance, sculptural installation, and participation as a dancer in the work of other artists and choreographers.

paggett’s work has been presented in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Danspace at St Mark’s Church (New York); in the Quadruple Consciousness exhibition at Vox Populi (Philadelphia); at Defibrillator (Chicago); and Commonwealth & Council. As a dancer, paggett has worked with artists and projects including Every House Has a Door, Yael Davids, Kelly Nipper, David Roussève/Reality, Meg Wolfe, Vic Marks, Cid Pearlman, Cheng-Chieh Yu, and with Ashley Hunt in their ongoing collaboration, “On Movement, Thought and Politics.” A recent recipient of a Headlands artist residency, a UCIRA grant and a MAP Fund grant, paggett is part of the full-time dance faculty at UC Riverside.

Ashley Hunt is interested in how images, objects, maps, writing and performance can engage social ideas and actions, including those of social movements, daily life, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate our art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. His work looks to structures that allow people to accumulate power, and those which keep others from getting it, while learning from the ways people come to know, contribute to or resist these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as mutual and complementary — drawing upon the ideas and aesthetics of social movements, cultural theory and art alike, the theorizing and practices of each informing the other.

Recent exhibitions and performances include Cue Art Foundation, Threewalls Gallery in Chicago, The Kitchen in New York, the 2012 Made in L.A. Biennial of the Hammer Museum, Sinopale 4 biennale in Sinop, Turkey, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Woodbourne State Correctional Institute in upstate New York, Putnamville Correctional Institution in Indiana, and numerous grassroots and community venues throughout the U.S. Recent writing has appeared in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly (2014), Native Strategies issue 4 (2014), and Shifter Magazine #20 (2013). Hunt co-directs the Program in Photography and Media at California Institute of the Arts and is on the faculty of the Visual Arts MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Kim Zumpfe is an artist and educator who lives and works in California. She works with images, objects, text, installation, collaborative structures, and exhibitions. In these various media, she is engaged with relationships between the ideological body and subjectivity in locations where multiple bodies develop, displace, produce, and forget to maintain boundaries and relations. Through modes of transformation, she investigates where borders within form disperse – in the body, subjectivity, and politicized space, as a way to interrogate encounters where collapse of identity, intimacy, responsibility, and power structures overlap.

Her work has been exhibited at Culver Center for the Arts Riverside, Visual Arts Center Fullerton, University Art Gallery Irvine, University Art Museum Long Beach, and several public and online sites. She is a member of Emily O, a free-floating artist collective that questions the relationship between individual and collective processes and identity through organizing exhibitions.

SUPPORT

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is made possible by The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional funds come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks in partnership with Fusebox and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People’s presentation at DiverseWorks is made possible through support from the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

This project is also sponsored by a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.

Development support of The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People was given through Show Box L.A.’s Los Angeles Dance & Research Residency Program, which is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, commissioning support from Clockshop for performance ever each more, performed at the Bowtie Project in Los Angeles, contributed to the company’s methodology.