08/03/2019
Honored that I get to be thought of and challenged by the important work that অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায় puts out into the world. She may not know this, but I claimed her as family long before we met. Thank you for being such a beautiful and powerful example of ferocity.
On today's , we honor brilliant artist and visionary leader, Ni'Ja Whitson. Ni'Ja is a gender nonconforming/trans interdisciplinary artist and writer, Creative Capital Awardee and Bessie Award winning performer, who has been referred to as “majestic” by the New York Times, and is recognized by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer. They are a 2018 MAP Fund recipient, the featured choreographer of the 2018 CCA Biennial, a 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Shortlist Book Award recipient, and 2018-2020 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow. Other recent awards include a Camargo/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, Dance in Process (DiP) Residency, Hedgebrook Fellowship, LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, among dozens of other residencies and awards across disciplines. Ni’Ja Whitson is an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside and is the Founder/Artistic Director of The NWA Project. Although “a bi-coastal artist,” they share, “I am nomadic by nature, so aim to be in the world flexibly and responsibly.”
Ni’Ja has been a student and practitioner of indigenous African ritual and resistance forms for two decades, creating work that reflects the sacred in conceptual and interdisciplinary performance. They engage a nexus of postmodern and African Diasporic performance practices, through a critical intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and spirituality.
In describing their work, Ni’Ja Whitson shares their poem:
I
I keep asking the impossible.
I keep stringing together sorrows
Traumas on curtains in rented rooms
Behind dumpsters
Parking lots with too many observers
And too few interrupters
They keep on watching us die
Because we have nerve
I yearn for space
And then im ashamed at what I can drink
For the thirsty
Numbers
Too few waters
Free of
Lead
Pipeline
Plastic
Ticking
Ticking
Ticking
Ticking
Seashells
II
I hope for quiet
Loud
S*x
During one of these eclipses sometimes
Pisces and such
Screaming pleasure
Something for which to open
My mouth wide
III
A body that’s impossible
A body that’s impossibly in
Skin that’s
Impossibly bound to
An impossible language that
Paralyzes
Genders beating back at
Blood instead of drowning
It is a spilling I’ll live through
Until I evaporate to supernova
