Thursday, June 6th, DeForrest Brown Jr. (2017 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow) returns to curate “Okonkwo Weeps In Exile,” a new rhythmic opera featuring producer Nicholas Dawson (Bookworms), drummer Donald Sturge Anthony Mckenzie II, poet and "enlightened educator" Rafael Sanchez, with text from Guerilla essayist and Pan-African Black separatist His Triumphant Blackness: The Negro Subversive.
Considering Chinua Achebe’s novels “Things Fall Apart,” and “No Longer At Ease” as conceptual points of departure, “Okonkwo Weeps In Exile” approaches distinct narratives that feature the Okonkwo character perennially restrained by the false behavioral virtuous order of capitalism established by Western colonization. The Okonkwo character is totemic and rendered as a static, singular experience of systematic and violent isolation and removal from the social architectural design of everyday life. Achebe’s novels depict parallel visions of men, tied by bloodline and lineage, struggling to assimilate into the optimized compositional frame of the colonial “utopian” model and conceivable future. Finding himself confined in the hubris of Western transactional idealism, Okonkwo tragically replays the trappings of a universally embedded ideology of civility and accumulation.
“Okonkwo Weeps in Exile” is a virtual embodiment of interpolated theatrical/organizational strictures within the “grotesque castle” of Western development. As a subversion of the operatic form, the performance expands both libretto (chants, poetry, essay) and rhythm (electronics, drums) into a collective ritual and vibration unreadable to a viewer.
Nicholas Dawson (Bookworms) is a Los Angeles-born, New York-based electronic composer who produces and performs sound works under the name Bookworms. His work is often concerned with various modes of representation and interpretation through audio and non-linear living sonic histories. By way of advanced synthesis, generative sequencing and audio collage, Dawson accesses detuned realities, and conjures harmonics, rhythms and ghosts of the truths which they have come to signify across time and space through repetition...a multi-dimensional blues. He has released music through L.I.E.S. Records, Anòmia, BANK Records, DFA, Bánh Mi Verlag, and Break World Records. His debut album Xenophobe was a double-LP of inspired dissections of rhythmic musical lineages; whereas his second album Appropriation Loops, expressed impressionistic concerns with “"recurrent, fluctuant feedback loops in popular and unpopular culture." Dawson has performed in varying contexts internationally, ranging from clubs like Contact Tokyo and squat raves in Germany and Mexico, to festivals like Out Festival Portugal and Off Festival Katowice, to art spaces and museums like MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Fine Arts alongside the likes of Charlemagne Palestine, Moor Mother, Drew McDowell, DJ Stingray, Sun Ra Arkestra, and Rrose. His monthly residency, Confused House at Bossa Nova Civic Club in Brooklyn has been a curated zone for open-format electronic experimentation since 2013, hosting performances from artists such as Juliana Huxtable, Traxx, Bill Kouligas, Foodman, and Shyboi. Dawson also co-founded the Confused House record label with Jason Letkiewicz aka Steve Summers in 2013. Currently, he is part of two collaborative live and recording projects with Dylan Scheer (Via App) and Leila Bordreuil, respectively.
His Triumphant Blackness: The Negro Subversive, whose government name is Victor R. Bradley, is a writer who blogs, a historian who Tweets (@Negrosubversive) and a revolutionary, trying to figure out what that means. He has studied at Fisk University, The New School for Social Research and New York University. His formative years were spent in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a 70% Black city where he grew accustomed to dealing with Whites as beings of utter insignificance. He left one day to find that the Whites had taken over the world and resolved to fix that. Ashe.
Rafael Sanchez was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1978 and began using his body and his language to explore the intersecting points of culture and commerce in 1995, after reading the work of Morrison, Ellison, Márquez. He has chased buses through Newark and Manhattan to find Africa, submerged himself in a 24-hour baptism, and honored Arthur Russell's spirit for almost half his life. Through the medium of performance poetry, he has presented his work at museums and galleries in New York over the last 13 years. He has been fortunate to collaborate with Jamal Moss, Marshall Allen, Zach Fabri, and Peter Dobill. Rafael invites us to experience what Franz Fanon calls a collective catharsis.
Don McKenzie is an American musician and composer from New York City. A world-class drummer and highly skilled beat-smith, McKenzie has been called a “powerhouse” and a “master of deep-pocket hip hop, funk, jazz and rock”; according to Vernon Reid (Living Color). Under the tutelage of Everett Collins (Isley Brothers) and world-renowned drumming teacher, Dom Famularo, McKenzie has steadily evolved into a truly great musician with a firm basis in theory. He has travelled extensively throughout Europe, North America, Australia, South America and Africa playing sold out shows at the finest venues in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Carthage, São Paulo and New York among many others. His illustrious career has led him to tour and record with an impressive list of avant-garde artists such as multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp, celebrated American guitarist Marc Ribot, and Grammy nominated jazz composer, Roswell Rudd, on BBC recordings in the MALIcool project. McKenzie’s work in hip hop and R&B includes backing prolific artists such as Pharoahe Monch, P.Diddy, Grave Diggaz, New Kingdom, DJ Spinna, Mr. Complex, Martin Luther, Cody ChesnuTT, Polyrhythm Addicts and R&B legends, Sweetback, and The Persuaders. He also serves as musical director for Kat DeLuna and teaches master classes at the Brooklyn Music School. McKenzie is best known however, for his long standing tenure with Vernon Reid as a member of the band Masque. An accomplished composer who is constantly seeking to push boundaries, his composition, “Kizzy,” which has been called “dreamy”, “atmospheric” and “powerfully evocative”, is featured on Masque’s third album, Other True Self.
