WILD ART PARTY is a series of rambunctious performance events aimed at providing a safe and supportive arena for diverse artists to show new performance work while growing and strengthening the Los Angeles experimental performance audience. It is a laboratory for artists to exhibit their practice outside of more traditional arenas or institutional programs, to experiment, or show works in progress. These one night events are free and open to the public with several presentations of new work in a party atmosphere. The audience is encouraged to dance, encounter new and surprising experiences, and explore new connections to the greater community of performative work in Los Angeles.

Get YOur Power Back: Blxck Freedom Art Healing Vortex
as part of Maiden LA

Wild Art Group is excited to invite Lakhiyia Hicks of HOMEplxce as this year's Wild Art Party Curator. Wild Art Group creates art projects relevant to our specific contemporary moment of NOW. To ensure Black voices are heard loudly during this much needed period of civil unrest, we are energized to present and support an all Black Wild Art Party.

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence."
–Audre Lorde

Come on into the Family Room as we come into full voice! No need to check your bags at the door, self-curate your truths, or edit out the parts you fear won’t be honored inside. Grab your intuition. Welcome home to calling back all your fragmented parts to a whole and free you! Co-imagined as a participatory movement-building space, we will activate drum, call & response, poetry, visual art, theatre, and song as Transformative Healing Justice, and organize our liberation through mobilizations of our joy with Street Dance Activism. Just as Yemaya rocks tides with moonlight, we will sway back and forth between embodied action and reflection, theory and practice. Come ready to dive deep. We are the ones, Family! No savior exists outside of ourselves. We are our greatest medicine. HOMEplace looks forward to meeting you/rs in the cauldron as we co-conjure a new worlding that insists upon our aliveness!

GUEST ARTISTS

Adisah, d. Sabela grimes, Djembe Jan, Dr. Mandisa Haarhoff, Queen Hollins and Iyatunde Oshunade Folayan of Earthlodge, Katrice, King Jaybo, Lakhiyia Hicks, Set the Versifier, Shamell Bell, Vanigile Gantsho, YaNi Davis, and Yazmin Monet Watkins

d. Sabela grimes, a 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow and a 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, is a trans-media storyteller whose creative practice draws directly from Black movement systems. His dance theater works are a mix of socio-historical observation, self-examination and speculative exploration through layers of interconnected sonic, visual and kinesthetic arrangements. Sabela affirms that his primary intention is to experience ritual as a means to play in the corrugated spaces of what he calls ‘Cosmic Blackness’. His most recent endeavor, ELECTROGYNOUS declares that Black gender qualities are infinite, multidimensional and distinct manifestations of wombniversal consciousness. His current project, Dark Matter Messages, dreams Octavia E. Butler’s body of work into a modular multi-disciplinary performance/installation experience. On faculty at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he continues to cultivate, Funkamental MediKinetics, a movement system that draws on the layered dance training, community building, and spiritual practices evident in Black vernacular and Street dance forms. Sabela loves speculative fiction, declarative realness and pancakes.

Janet L. Nicholson affectionately known as “Djembe Jan” is an artist and cultural wellness advocate from Southern California. She uses the art making process and traditional drumming as tools for healing, building community, and unleashing the creative power of spirit within.

Dr. Mandisa Haarhoff completed her Ph.D. at the University of Florida in 2018 on a Fulbright scholarship, and currently holds a full-time position as lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Her dissertation, titled “Black in the Afterlife of Apartheid: Death and Blackness in Late- Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Narratives”, considers how black South African writers use the trope of death to articulate black positionality, subjectivity, and otherness. She completed her MA in Drama at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal with funding from the National Research Foundation. She is working on her first NRF funded book project, “Kaffirs are Kwerekweres: White indigeneity and Black Absenting in the South African Farm Novel, which examines the ways in which farm novels and Plaasroman participate in constructions of white indigeneity and enact black absenting throughout the late-colonial and apartheid period. Dr. Haarhoff’s research interests are concentrated around postcolonial theory, black studies and critical race theory. Her teaching centers on African and diasporic literature. Haarhoff has toured her award-winning one-person show, Crush-hopper in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. She is also a playwright and performer.

Queen Hollins and Lyatunde Folayan of Earthlodge

My name is Queen Hollins and I am the Founder and Executive Director of the Earthlodge Center for Transformation (the Earthlodge). The Earthlodge was stablished in 2004 in my home in Long Beach, CA based on Black Southern Indigenous Healing Practices I learned from my grandmother as a child.  The Earthlodge has become a beacon of inspiration and self-healing for womyn, LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer), children, gender non conforming communities and cis men who support the rise of the feminine energy on the planet. Through the Earthlodge, these communities have not only healed and transformed individually but the healing has shifted lineages of dysfunction, pain and trauma.  The Earthlodge Center for Transformation is a spiritual sanctuary and oasis located in the urban area of Long Beach that provides a safe space for LGBTQI and women of all ages int women, queer and our allies of all races/social/spiritual/economical and cultural backgrounds to identify and heal their trauma, meet and build community with one another, fellowship, have ceremony, tend the earth and herbs, learn about nature based spiritual principles, to have sacred weddings, to have spiritual baby welcoming ceremonies (babyshowers), death rites of passage ceremonies, conduct nature based workshops and more. No one is turned away due to economic circumstances.  Thus many of those we serve are people of color, low income and suffering from mental and emotional distress.

Katrice J. Jackson is an Artist, Writer, Priest of Oshun, Energy Practitioner, and Licensed Psychotherapist.

Iyatunde Oshunade Folayan is an AfroQueer writer, healer and artist. Iyatunde committed herself to the practice of Earth Medicine and healing while training under Queen Hollins at the Earthlodge Center for Transformation in Long Beach, CA in 2010. The teachings Queen shared on the ability of plants, flowers to bring about emotional, physical balance resonated in her own healing journey. As a Gatekeeper and Earth Steward at the Earthlodge, Iyatunde has helped to create traditional ceremony and provided Healing Justice and support for hundreds of women and girls, survivors of sexual trauma, formerly incarcerated, gnc, queer and trans communities of color. Iyatunde draws on her background as healer, dancer and artist to bring vitality and safe connection to community circles. She is excited to grow deeper into healing medicine as a practitioner of sound healing using Crystal Singing Bowls and bringing the science and rejuvenating power of the Ocean and Rivers to all in need of balance. Iyatunde is interested in  discovering a deeper relationship with the messages plants and flowers bring us through film, photography and story-telling. Iyatunde serves a grant writer and board member of the Earthlodge.

Jared O’Brien also known by the stage name King Jaybo is a singer, rapper, songwriter, social justice advocate, and community organizer. O’Brien was born and raised in Belize but moved to Los Angeles in 2014 with his mother and brothers who are also musical artists. In 2017, Jared joined the Youth Justice Coalition (YJC), a community organizing institute based in South Central LA. As an organizer, Jared’s work focuses on dismantling what he calls the “criminal injustice system”, as well as, ending deportation, and the school-to-jail track. Two years after joining YJC, O’Brien carved out a space in the LA social justice landscape fusing art and community organizing focused on state and local policy change. He helped set up a national open-mic music program, an rapid response covid-19 relief fund for undocumented residents, and music industry orientation program in Los Angeles. Despite being offered distribution deals, O’Brien started his own recording and management company. He was selected for a taskforce to create the first Youth Diversion and Development Department in Los Angeles County. In 2017 , Jared helped to end LA county’s 3.5 Billion dollar Jail expansion plan. In April of 2020 Jared worked as a lead coordinator for the Justice LA coalition to free over 4000 people from the LA County Jail. Jared was arrested multiple times in Belize and at the age of 17 arrested again in California but managed avoided a nine year prison sentence in the California state prisons. He encountered hyper-aggressive and violent treatment in his interactions with the system which fueled an awareness and continues to guide his decisions to develop himself and his community. Jaybo uses music to connect people in the movement with themes of hope, change, international solidarity, racial, and gender justice. Some of his song lyrics have been adopted as protest chants during #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations in Los Angeles. Jared says that his experience as an Afro-Latinx immigrant in Los Angeles helps him to bridge gaps between Black and Brown Communities.

Lakhiyia Hicks
i am home.
I am a public health cultural shapeshifter.
Last seen sporting many fitted caps, I am Freedom Art Warrior, inviting us to remember who we are. Depending on community needs at hand, this may mean masquerading as a spoken word poet, curator, playwright, director, Participatory Action Researcher, singer, dancer, curriculum-builder, Kuringa/joker and you name it. Pedagogy/Theatre of the Oppressed ground my feet with deep roots in multidisciplinary means for being the fact of our freedom in a world designed to systematically undermine our birthright to belonging. I curate educational spaces as capacity-building rehearsal rooms in which we can choose to move ourselves from being passive objects in the face of injustice to being active subjects in co-creating realities we actually desire and consent to living. I am means as destination. I am prefigurative politics in motion. Community-centered innovation beats at the heart of embodied co-learning. Those made most vulnerable in society become the most creative thought partners and strategic leaders for manifesting urgently needed alternate universes composting at the roots of disproportionate unwanted life outcomes. I have graduated with a Bachelors in Humxn Communications from Northwestern University; Community-Engaged Theatre (Womxn's prison, Youth Centers, et al) Graduate Study Abroad Certificate from NYU; and a Masters in Applied Theatre Arts from USC. I am lived and work experience as a global citizen, who is uniquely present to underlying causes of health inequities and social determinants of health (e.g. poverty, structural, institutional, interpersonal and internalized oppression) as well as best practices to transmute through community and chosen family organizing, peer education, train-the-trainer approaches, and the community health worker model. I contribute Participatory Action Research/Real-Search at international conferences, retreats, local actions, in FREE LA high schools, at the Chuco’s Justice Center, in partnerships with organizations, and on university campuses as lecturer from UCLA all the way to the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) in Brazil.
I am Lakhiyia, “home” in isiXhosa and Haitian Creole.
I am founder and project manager for HOMEplxce, an educational consulting firm dedicated to the mobilization of survivors of childhood sexual assault as Liberation Arts-based Community Health Strategists across the Blxck Queer Diaspora.
Come. Meet HOMEplxce at the intersections of Transformative and Healing justice!

Set The Versifier a poet from Inglewood who’s roots lie in the oral tradition of our people. His poetry is an oration of a vivid story like no other.

"Visionary Instigator" of Street Dance Activism and Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation, Dr. Shamell Bell is a mother, community organizer, dancer/choreographer, and documentary filmmaker. Bell received her PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance department. She received her M.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and B.A. with Honors in American Studies and Ethnicity specializing in African American Studies at the University of Southern California. Dr. Bell is currently a Lecturer of Somatic Practices and Global Performance at Harvard University and Lecturer of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College. Her work on what she calls, "street dance activism" situates street dance as grassroots political action from her perspectives as a scholar, dancer, and choreographer. Shamell’s research examines street dance movements in South Central Los Angeles through an autoethnographic and performance studies lens. Her street dance experience includes featured roles in music videos, award shows, and tours. An original member of the #blacklivesmatter movement, beginning as a core organizer with Justice 4 Trayvon Martin Los Angeles (J4TMLA)/Black Lives Matter Los Angeles to what she now describes as an Arts & Culture liaison between several social justice organizations. She also consults for social justice impact in the tv, film, theater and music industry.

vangile gantsho is a poet, healer and co-founder of impepho press . Unapologetically black woman, she has travelled the continent and the globe participating in literary events and festivals. gantsho is the author of two poetry collections: Undressing in front of the window (2015) and red cotton (2018). She holds an MA from the University Currently Known as Rhodes (2016) and was named one of Mail& Guardian’s Top Young 200 South Africans of 2018. Her latest collection, red cotton, an exploration of what it means to be black, queer, and woman in modern-day South Africa, was named City Press Top Poetry Read of 2018, and long-listed for the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2020 Award.

YaNi Davis is the founder of The Peace People's movement and hopes to continue impacting the world with spirit-filled messages of freedom, love, liberation, communalism and peace! YaNi has been a featured speaker, preacher,poet and teaching-artist around the United States, throughout Europe and Asia. She has shared the stage with top performers, theologians, creatives, and influencers around the world, an honor that she does not take lightly. YaNi currently resides in Los Angeles, California, but continues to call Atlanta, GA and Queens, NY home. She is a humble vessel; a scholar, a seer, and steward with a heart for all people. YaNi is the essence of Peace Personified and continues to exude authentic qualities of what it means to be this generation's griot and storyteller! She is the founder of My SupANaturalLife which help provide wholistic and communal care for those moving through life’s challenges.

Yazmin Monet Watkins is a poet, comedian, writer, actress, content creator, educator and activist. As an actress, Watkins is represented by United Talent Agency and creates with her all Black female comedy group Obama's Other Daughters. Watkins serves on the Arts & Culture committee for Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

MAIDEN LA is an inclusive and expansive county-wide survey of art happenings that in encouraging the use of alternative spaces, considers Los Angeles as a platform for generative discourse and creative exchange.

This Wild Art Party is supported in part by Wild Art Group Board of Advisors, Generous Donors, and the California Arts Council's Local Impact Grant; supporting community driven arts projects for arts organizations to foster equity, access, and opportunity in historically marginalized communities by centering the arts as a vehicle for building strong, healthy, vibrant, and resilient communities.

Guest Artists

DJ def.sound

PHYSICAL PLASTIC

Alarm was conceived in the middle of the night in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, with yet another violent disruption from a security alarm. Since, Alarm has become a questioning of boundaries, ownership and power in the urban environment as well as the geopolitical scene, performing ideas of need, limit and transgression in the context of capitalist society and its ongoing crises. Alarm implicates us in questions of difference, of desire, and law. In a series of inter-woven vignettes, vocal compositions by Christofides are layered with Brigette Dunn-Korpela’s choreography and the visual strategies of Dasha Sur, with the ensemble portraying trespasser, bystander, and the alarm—or evoking the mythological sirens who tempt transgression. Short work-in-progress excerpt performed by: Joseph Baca; Bailey Edwards; Cristina Fernandez; Kestrel Leah; Tyree Marshall; Dominique McDougal; Lisa McNeely; and Lizi Watt. Costumes by David Moyer and Kestrel Leah. Lighting by Katelan Braymer.

PHYSICAL PLASTIC is a director-composer partnership between Yiannis Christofides (Cyprus) and Kestrel Leah (UK) rooted in the symbiotic creation of sound and gesture. We invite genuine collaboration across disciplines and—in response to rising nationalist tendencies—across cultures. We have recently been in residency at The Watermill Center and are recipients of the 2017 New Music USA Grant for Alarm. YIANNIS CHRISTOFIDES is a composer and sound designer combining practices in electronic art music, creative sound design, sound art, media theory and cultural studies. He creates music and soundscapes for art installations, performance, media, and curatorial projects. His work has been presented at leading venues and institutions throughout Europe and the U.S including The Lincoln Center, The Athens Festival, and The Southbank Centre, London. KESTREL LEAH is a director and performer working across music, film, dance and visual art. She earned a Masters in Acting at CalArts, and combines practices in Suzuki training, extended vocal technique, and the methods of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Regular collaborators include WaxFactory (NYC), B. Dunn Movement (LA) and visual artist Julie Bena (France).


Julie Weitz
Artist Julie Weitz will perform in character for her first live performance as My Golem, her social media alter ego. Transgressing cultural, religious and gender norms, My Golem parodies anti-Semitic propaganda in an absurdist attempt to counteract rampant xenophobia. Inspired by the Jewish myth of artificial intelligence and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Weitz’s character transforms into “The Great Dominatrix” and subsequently doms an inflatable globe.

Julie Weitz is a visual artist, writer and educator based in Los Angeles. Her videos and photographs consider the psychological, physiological and social dimensions of virtual identity and her immersive video installations examine our bodily relationship to the screen and moving image. Weitz has had solo exhibitions at Public Pool Gallery (Encino, CA), Young Projects (Los Angeles, CA), Chimento Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA) and The Suburban (Oak Park, IL). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions and screenings at LAXART (Los Angeles, CA), Untitled SF (Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles, CA), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA) and Tampa Museum of Art (Tampa, FL). She has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The L.A. Times, The New York Times, Photograph Magazine, and Hyperallergic. Weitz currently teaches in LA and is a regular contributor at CARLA.

Paul Pescador
Using site specific video footage shot at Blue Roof Studios as well as a collection of props and studio materials, Paul Pescador will discuss the role of the church in his own childhood as well as Latino culture. He will examine the ritualistic aspect of Catholicism and how this manifests in communal gathering as well as its historic relationship to colonization.

Paul Pescador is an artist, filmmaker, performer and writer discussing social interactions and intimacy as they pertain to his own personal identity and history. He graduated with an MFA from University of California, Irvine and a BA from University of Southern California. Selected performances include: Machine Projects, Los Angele; Los Angeles Contemporary Archives; Performa 2015; Colony, New York; UC Berkeley: Durham Studio Theater; PAM, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, with KCHUNG TV, Los Angeles; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Los Angeles; and ForYourArt, Los Angeles. http://paulpescador.com/main.html

Maceo Paisley
Using everyday objects Maceo Paisley’s performance explores social constructs through the creation of abstract sculptures that include his body. Using balance, force, leverage, and soft power these physical metaphors illustrate the mechanical nature of our social arrangement and how humanity and culture interact to complete these social structures implicitly and explicitly contributing to the existence of the paradigms we often feel trapped within.

Multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and cultural producer, Maceo explores themes in society and identity through movement, language, and imagery. For the past decade Maceo has danced professionally, performed on national stages as a spoken word and performance artist, and with Citizens of Culture, continues to investigate culture with social research that seeks to identify new ways of being in an increasingly complex world. http://www.maceopaisley.com



This year’s Wild Art Party is co-produced with Los Angeles Nomadic Division. www.nomadicdivision.org

Wild Art Party is supported in part by the CalArts Alumni Council Seed Grant and Wild Art Group Advisory Board and Members.

Guest Artists

DJ Haiiku

Rachel Ho
“GHOST” a mysterious installation involving a human-sized plaster sculpture.

Yanina Orellana
“We are all sons of la Chingada” - A dance performance to the rhythm of cumbia, enjoy with lime and a pinch of salt.

Kidi Band
LA-based quartet comprised of three percussionists and a prepared guitarist who are all distinct vocalist.

Things From Before
“things from before pt. 5: i dont know any of these people” explores the fictional worlds of childhood and the moment at which we begin to excavate those forgotten perspectives.

[[personablack]]]
an artist interested in simple materials.

Sophia Stoller
“The Other Side” - An excerpt of the full-length immersive show that will premiere in LA in May, this piece is a cross section of a manufactured social hierarchy. With original music performed live by Justin Scheid Choreography created in collaboration with performers.

Lydia Hicks
“Tenodera sinensis: Birth Observation” - A stream of consciousness inspired scientific observation piece.

Zach Carver - "selfie cannon"

Guest Artists:

DJ's Bassium, Beatricks, and Corrupt Catalyst

Murphy Martin, Allison Honeycutt and Jessica Hemingway
NUDE SUITS - A fantastical underwater installation in which you can try on flesh suits. Meet a sea goddess and move along with the music. Explore the depths of the unknown through auditorial, visual, and sensational experience.

ACTS OF MATTER
is a performance group founded in 2014 to support the creation of new work by Artistic Director Rebecca Lemme. Thematically and physically, Acts of Matter engages with work grounded in an unfettered willingness to attempt something while accepting the possibility of its failure. This physical exertion—this act of trying—is the core of humanity in the work.

Aubree Lynn
Dear neigh·bor, ˈnābər/ verb
1. (of a place or thing) be situated next to or very near (another). How do we live next to each other? How do we experience proximity? This piece invites you to participate in developing an archive of collective experiences of neighborship. Come, share, your secrets are safe here.

Laura Jean Anderson
new music performances that highlight extremes of human emotion.

DANCE AEGIS
Choreographer Andrea Gise, Composed Justin Scheid
"WARNING: This Piece Contains Dark Themes"
The performance explores dystopian scenarios through the darkly humorous and slightly skewed lens of contemporary society.

Moira McDonald - “Selkie” Toy Theater Puppet Show

Eric Andrew Carter - Video Installation