💖 Join Toronto Dance Community Love-In (TO Love-In) for our 2024 Artist Feature Program💖
Artist Feature: jaamil olawale kosoko (they|them)
Rest, Craft, and Conjure: a restshop series
about the sessions ↓
“Our dream space has been stolen, and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest.”
― Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
REST, CRAFT, and CONJURE is a restshop series unfolding over the next three months designed by poet, choreographer, author, and curator jaamil olawale kosoko. Centering themes of rest and restoration as a creative instrument for radical world building, exploring horizontality, the esoteric, and community archival methodologies, REST, CRAFT, CONJURE gifts critical time and space to its participants to deepen the reservoir of dreaming as a creative tool to allow the critical embodiments for healing, rest reparation, expanded visioning, and embodied self-care to emerge.
By the end of the course, you will have built a comprehensive self-care plan, gained clarity on your foundational life vision agreements, and developed the mindset and strategy needed to thrive more expansively and restfully as an artist, educator or cultural worker. Your innate poetic knowledge will act as a guide, empowering you to map and reclaim your most abundant, prosperous, and creative work-life balance.
Bring water, a notebook, a pen, wear studio clothes/layers, and have enough space to be and experience privacy.
about the artist ↓
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, Michigan. kosoko moves across the creative realms of performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. Through ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjure and crafts perpertual modes of freedom, healing, and care.
jaamil's works- including Black Body Amnesia (2022), Chameleon (2020), Séancers (2017), and the Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia (2015)—have toured to venues and festivals such as Abrons Art Center, Gibney Dance Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Fusebox Festival, and Montréal Arts Interculturels, among others.
jaamil is the recipient of several awards including the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, 2022 LaBecque Residency (Switzerland), 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship in the Arts, 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, among many others. jaamil lectures regularly at Princeton Univiersity and The University of the Arts Stockholm. Visit jaamil.com for more information
who is this session for? ↓
If you are a dancer, theatre artist, actor, performance artist, writer, choreographer, improviser, or movement practitioner/dancer with an interest in making, creative process, or devising, at any stage of your career, this session is for you.
what ↓
The Artist Feature program supports an artist over the course of several months in their chosen area of research. It creates space for movement practitioners, and makers alike to interact with the artists' research, ideas, and process. jaamil olawale kosoko is offering a total of 6 sessions, 2 in March, 2 in April, and 2 in May, led from their Dream Body Rest Syllabus.
when ↓
Session 1~ 3-5pm EDT, Thursday March 21, 2024
Session 2~ 3-5pm EDT, Friday March 22, 2024
Session 3~ 3-5pm EDT, Thursday April 18, 2024
Session 4~ 3-5pm EDT, Friday April 19, 2024
Session 5~ 3-5pm EDT, Thursday May 16, 2024
Session 6~ 3-5pm EDT, Friday May 17, 2024
*Due to the nature of the work the group size will be capped at 15 participants. The series funtions as a whole, however attendance at every session is not necessary to participate. Please select the sessions that best suite your availability and desire.
where ↓
All sessions are happening on Zoom. Link to session(s) will be sent once your register.