Riting: jumatatu poe in conversation with devika wickremesinghe
devika: Hey Jumatatu. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk. I thought we could start by talking about place and space. What has been on my mind as I work with Milka (Djordjevich, performing ANTHEM) is the experience of performing a piece in different places. I have a strong experience of watching audience members while I perform, and that changes in different theaters, different cities, different nights.
jumatatu: Well I wanna say first that I have that experience too. I feel like I watch the performance that the audience is doing more than I watch the performance that people who’re not in the audience are doing. I I feel really interested in that. In the kind of aesthetic and social possibilities that there are. The possibilities of communication that are in that. Also there’s different species of places-these art institutions, vs being outside on sidewalks, in alleyways, in black neighborhoods. And neighborhoods in Philly are going to be different than Dallas, so different from New York, Atlanta, and it’s going to be so different in LA. You know the US is so big and the ideas that people shape around space and around ownership of space, how that space forms neighborhoods, they shift from place to place. Within those neighborhoods people occupy space differently. And so it feels like one of the things that I’ve been discovering as we’ve been doing this work and doing it a bunch of times that it’s just necessarily going to take time to get to know a place, we have to invest time and energy and patience into getting to know a place. And if we are not doing that then we are not doing the work we need to be doing.
And what does that encompass in terms of “getting to know a place” ?
In advance of the LAX Festival we asked Riting.org to partner with us in profiling the twelve pieces in the festival. jumatatu poe’s, Let ‘im Move You: Intervention opens on October 12th, 2018, location to be revealed, as part of the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival . Details can be found here.
Riting is an experiment in writing that engages with performance happening now in Los Angeles. Riting is a ground for encounters between artists, their critical community, and the public they belong to. Riting brings together a multiplicity of bodies and a polyphony of voices. Riting supposes there is no definitive untangling. Riting assumes mutuality of investment in the ecology of performance activity in this city.
