Fabric Softener - A+J Summer Happenings Festival

Amanda + James

AMANDA + JAMES' 2022 Summer Happenings Festival will open with Asia Stewart presenting "Fabric Softener" at Coffey Street Studios

Coffey Street Studio

Fabric Softener is an interdisciplinary performance that combines song, movement, and painting to meditate on intergenerational trauma and the perverse inheritance(s) passed down by Black m/others. Using words of advice from her late grandmother, Asia Stewart crafted a narrative that focuses on the survival strategies she learned to navigate the world. Fabric Softener’s hour-long ritual is a cross between a blood-strewn baptism and funeral. The performance is punctuated by outbursts of spirituals and excerpts from a 1977 archival recording of Toni Morrison reading her novel, Song of Solomon. Morrison’s reading describes the special wisdom that circulates between three characters: Pilate, her daughter Reba, and granddaughter Hagar. They form a family much like the one Stewart grew up in where “women produce[d] women who produce[d] women [without] men.” Throughout the performance, Stewart’s gestures, movement, and voice become intertwined with Pilate, Reba, and Hagar’s story and enact the “litany of growing up” as a Black woman in the United States. In this performance, Stewart is joined by violinist Yaz Lancaster. Lancaster's musicality and sound design ground the work and provide the energy and dynamism necessary to push Fabric Softener forward. Performed by:Asia Stewart (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality. In 2020, Stewart concluded her first independent performance series, Graft, which attempts to capture the violence that constructions of whiteness and femininity wrought on Black bodies. Works from that series have been showcased at venues such as the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. One piece was also recently acquired by the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. Stewart will continue to develop new works in 2022 and 2023 with the support of the Brooklyn Arts Fund and A.I.R. Fellowship.Yaz Lancaster (they/them) is a Black transdisciplinary artist most interested in relational aesthetics and the everyday; fragments and collage; and liberatory politics. Yaz performs as a violinist, vocalist, and steel pannist in a wide variety of settings from DIY and popular music to chamber ensembles; and their work is presented in many different mediums and collaborative projects. It often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of identity and liberation, to natural phenomena and poetics. Yaz has had the privilege and opportunity to create with artists like A Far Cry, Beth Morrison Projects, ContaQt (with Evan Ziporyn), Contemporaneous, JACK Quartet, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Skiffle Steel Orchestra, Sound-Off: Music for Bail and Wadada Leo Smith. They are in post-genre duo laydøwn with guitarist-producer Andrew Noseworthy; and work with Luna Composition Lab, I CARE IF YOU LISTEN and Peach Mag. Yaz holds degrees in violin and poetry from NYU; and they live in Lenapehoking (Harlem, NYC) with their bassador puppy Nori.Fabric Softener is presented with the support of the 2022 Brooklyn Arts Council Brooklyn Arts Fund. Brooklyn Arts Fund (BAF) is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council.

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Fabric Softener - A+J Summer Happenings Festival

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Fabric Softener - A+J Summer Happenings Festival

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