Credits

• Billing

  CONCEPT AND PERFORMANCE                          

  Bimbola Akinbola

  ADDITIONAL PERFORMERS                     

  ruby onyinyechi amanze, Holly Bass, and Jennifer Ligaya

  SOUNDSCAPE                                           

  Elise Hernandez

  ADDITIONAL LIGHTING DESIGN AND SUPPORT

  Matt Sharp, MCA Theater Production Coordinator

• About the Performers

  Bimbola Akinbola is a Chicago-based visual artist, performance maker, and scholar. Her artistic and scholarly work is concerned with the complicated and nagging nature of belonging, queerness, and the concept of family. Incorporating a variety of practices ranging from drawing and painting to rubbing her make-up stained skin across surfaces, her work explores mark-making and performance as modes of organization, remembrance, and repair. Bimbola has shown work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Center on Halsted, The Riverside Arts Center, and Compound Yellow, and collaborated on creative projects with universities all over the country. She is an assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern University.

  ruby onyinyechi amanze (Performer), born in in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria, and based in Philadelphia, focuses her practice on paper to explore the vast magical potential of space and the balance between magnitude and weightlessness. Incorporating a working vocabulary of just seven elements, amanze plays with the possibilities of spatial relationships, both within the page and beyond its borders. Recurring beings and inanimate objects have the same function; flat forms interact (play) in endless configurations suggest movement through space and architecture. Indicators of geography, time, and place have been removed to unify the objects as a collective, while maintaining a sense of ambiguity. amanze is interested in the inherent ability of a work on paper to appear flat within its perimeter, while also conveying depth and infinite expansion. To remain minimal, yet achieve a spatially complex and poetic essence, is the challenge in her drawings. amanze was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars Award in Drawing to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an Open Sessions participant at the Drawing Center, and an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum, New York. She has exhibited her work globally including at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2019, amanze was named the Deutsche Bank Featured Artist at Frieze New York. Her work is collected by the Deutsche Museum, Jewish Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and, most recently, the CCS Bard College Hessel Museum of Art.

  Holly Bass (Performer) is a multidisciplinary performance and visual artist, a writer, and a director. She currently has work on view at the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Triennial. Her creative output includes durational performances lasting from 5 to 12 hours, as well as video, installation, and photography. She has received numerous Artist Fellowships from the DC Arts Commission and was a 2019 Red Bull Detroit artist-in-residence and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. She is a 2020–22 Live Feed resident artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021–22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. A Cave Canem fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. As an arts journalist early in her career, she was the first to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in American Theatre magazine. A gifted and dedicated teaching artist, she directed a year-round creative writing and performance program at the DC juvenile detention center for four years. She is currently the national director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program that strategically uses the arts to transform schools facing historic inequities.

  Elise Hernandez (Soundscape) loves to listen, connect, and vibe. They grew up in Miami with sounds and influences from across the Caribbean and Latin America, witnessing how music can usher home and belonging, anywhere. When they aren’t working as an evaluator and researcher with queer elders, you can find them curating playlists for parties in their parking lot, reading and writing sappy poetry, spending time with their beloveds, or dancing for themselves in the mirror à la Rihanna.

  Jennifer Ligaya (Performer) is an AfroPinay sound and performance composer and and artist-scholar born and raised in Chicago with an interdisciplinary background in visual art, vocal performance, dance, and theater. Mother to a Scorpio son, MA graduate of the Interdisciplinary Art program at Columbia College in Chicago, and PhD student of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, her original work includes solo and collaborative performance compositions and sound installations. A sponsored artist, grant recipient, and commissioned multimedia artist, her compositions amplify critical conversations around identity, liberatory practices, ancestral indigenous knowledge systems, and moments of communal healing, through the weaving of traditional and contemporary sound, performance, and personal ancestral folk arts practices. The newest core member of Honey Pot Performance, Ligaya’s current creative practice explores Afro-Asian feminist subjectivities and speculative arts, indigenous healing and survival practices, and the genealogies of anticolonial spiritual-political resistance.