Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste: Evil Nigger
Artist, designer, and composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste completes his ISSUE Project Room residency in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist LaMont Hamilton in a co-presentation at The Kitchen. The performance features the duo sequentially performing all five of their previously staged “parts” of Julius Eastman’s 1979 composition “Evil Nigger” as a 24-hour interpretive cycle with select performances by Nyugen E. Smith and Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson. The work runs continuously from Friday to Saturday, with five publicly accessible segments opening in parts throughout the 24 hours. A $5 RSVP commitment is asked to ensure seating for each public viewing.
“In this final and cumulative iteration, we are concluding our investigation of Julius Eastman as an archetypal trickster, specifically within the canon of Black American cultural practice. Here, by presenting previously standalone pieces sequentially, we are able to make explicit what Eastman referred as an “organic” principle of performance, a cumulative process in which new sections of a work are overlapped with preceding sections, resulting in a dense, mounting-yet-nuanced simultaneity of expression: a pursuit through which we are able to further understand Eastman as complicating minimalist form, rather than reinforcing its emergent supremacy.
Specifically, we acknowledge Eastman’s own subtle contradiction in regards to the organic principle that “the information is taken out at a gradual and logical rate” to be an impetus to examine a principle which simultaneously emphasizes the preservation and accumulation as well as the frictions which might occur upon their intersection. In making explicit the sonic, gestural and material relationships within and across each of the five performances in this series, we embrace the incongruity (or infeasibility) of overlapping content without losing information.” —Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Program:
Julius Eastman: Evil nigger (1979)
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste - piano
Photo by Texas Isaiah
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a Bessie-nominated composer, designer and performer, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. A current Issue Project Room Artist-In-Residence, his work, through the lens of precarious labor, complicates notions of industry, identity, and environment and the implications of the intersections of such phenomena. He has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Newark Museum, The Public Theater’s Under The Radar, The Studio Museum In Harlem, Bard College, National Sawdust, The Jam Handy, Tanz Im August, American Realness, Knockdown Center, FringeArts, Stoa Cultural Center, MIT, JACK, University Settlement, Harlem Stage, as well as on Dazed Digital, Complex, and Boiler Room.