It’s our sixth year, and we’re ready for a slow jam.

Please join us in launching this year’s Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival on October 11 at Think Tank Gallery. This year’s exchange is with artists and curators in Philadelphia, and we’re so grateful to jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham for helping us kick things off. They’ll be joined by DJ Erika Kayne, as well as other surprise guests!

Choreographers jumatatu m. poe and Donte Beacham start off the night with a short instruction of some of the close dancing they have been experimenting with in rehearsal, related to the hip swing of the J-Sette march, and the importance of pelvic movement in African-descended dance forms. Throughout the night, jumatatu and Donte perform brief slow choreographies with local dance artists Amaria Stern and Jakevis Thomason.

The space is blessed by the sage musical curations of DJ Erika Kayne. Even as we may challenge, tempt, and transgress it, we will honor that slow pulse, the space in it, the complex syncopations, the polyrhythmicity.

Less of a “throwback” and more of a reclaiming: a transformation of those memories of high school dances that many of us didn’t attend—at least not in the way we wanted to. We are going to welcome the slow jam onto the dance floor, and meet it with a close embrace—maybe just of ourselves, or of a consensual partner. . . or maybe more than one. Let’s get close; feel our wise hips swing into the same dimly lit spaces, hear inhales and exhales from a mouth hovering near our ear, pumping oxygen for a heart rate that’s pulsing a bit faster than usual. . . Let’s see what we can get up to way down below 95 bpm. Let’s be people dancing up on other people, when we want to and when we are wanted. Let’s give our permission for the proximity that we are feeling. Let’s be queer and normal and strange and open and close. . . very close. . . Sweating to the beat of slow motion.