New York Live Arts presents the first Bill Chats of the 2022-2023 season featuring Nigerian-born writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in conversation with Live Arts Artistic Director Bill T. Jones. For this season, the popular series includes a partnership with The New School, where Jones has been named a 2022-2023 Presidential Visiting Scholar. The conversation will take place at New York Live Arts and also be available via livestream on December 6th, at 7pm. General public tickets are $15 for in-person and $5 for livestream, and can be purchased at NewYorkLiveArts.org or 212-691-6500, on sale now. Free tickets for New School students, faculty and staff, can be reserved here. 
 
Chude-Sokei’s book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, was an important source of inspiration and information for the newest work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Curriculum II, which will have its NY premiere early in 2023. Jones says about this work, “I have oscillated between two or more polarities my entire career: love, mortality, and what it means to be human”. The Sound of Culture begins in the 19th Century and continues beyond the present, exploring the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Distilling a diverse range of subject matter including minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence, Chude-Sokei states that Black people have been equated with Machines. He quotes Jamaican writer and cultural theorist  Sylvia Wynter and suggests that “The other must be understood as not just that which is oppressed or marginalized or rendered inhuman, subhuman, or animal; it also must be understood ‘as that which is to come.’”

The New School’s Presidential Visiting Scholars program brings major thinkers of the highest standing to the university to teach unique courses, collaborate on creative or research initiatives, deliver lectures, and participate in public programming and other special projects. As part of this prestigious appointment, Live Arts and The New School will collaborate on a series of events including public conversations, performances, classes, etc, that explore urgent and intersectional questions in these unsettling times, including identity, artist/citizen, community, climate justice. Additional programming this winter and spring to be announced.

WHO:    Bill T. Jones, Louis Chude-Sokei
 
WHAT:   Bill Chats, in partnership with The New School
 
WHEN:  Tuesday, December 6th at 7pm
 
WHERE: New York Live Arts 219 W 19th St.
Tickets $15. Livestream $5

Free for The New School Community

newyorklivearts.org 212 924 0077

 
BILL T. JONES (Artistic Director/Co-Founder/Choreographer: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) is the recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award; the 2013 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award, 2007 Obie Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for The Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and lillian Gish Prize; and the 1994 MacArthur Fellows Award. In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.” Mr. Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Mr. Jones is Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an incubator for movement based artists at every level of their career.

LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI is a Professor of English and Director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University. Books includes the award-winning The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015) and the acclaimed memoir, Floating in A Most Peculiar Way (2021).  He is Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies and founder of the sonic art and archival project, Echolocution. Other projects include collaborations with German electronic musical icons, Mouse on Mars, and work as lead artist and curator for “Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention,” a sound art project in Nuremberg, Germany focused on Nazi Party historical sites for which for which he won the prestigious Kulturstiftun Des Bundes Award from the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Chude-Sokei was also a curator of Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Festival of Afrofuturism. 

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
We acknowledge that New York Live Arts is located on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people in New York City. We acknowledge and pay respect to the Lenape people and to all Indigenous people past, present and future, here and everywhere. Led by world-renowned artist Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts produces and presents dance, music and theater performances in its 20,000 square-foot home, including a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square-foot studios. New York Live Arts offers an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people; it supports the continuing professional development of performing artists. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; it is the company’s sole producer, providing support and the environment to originate innovative and challenging new work for the Company and New York’s creative community.