Photo credit: gif/meme from Annalise Keating character from How To Get Away With Murder played by Viola Davis
Thursday, October 28 at 7:30pm
Tickets: Free With Registration
Join us for a special sneak preview of Sis! White Male! as part of the Fall Residency Program at The Center at West Park.
Led by Queer, Black, Interdisciplinary Artist, Louis DeVaughn Nelson (Hokum Arts), you'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the development process.
The piece is a site-specific performance, utilizing surveys distributed to Nelson's WOC friends/colleagues that ask questions about female/racial identity in America and the affects/effects of daily life amidst our collective consciousness in the desire to dismantle white supremacy.
Invitees will be prompted to ask questions and contribute to the piece - as this is a crowd-sourced devised work that heralds the audience-as-performer in its methodology.
This event is FREE to the public (with limited space via reservations) and is made possible through funding from City Artist Corps, a new citywide initiative designed to help artists who were both hard hit by the pandemic and who may have been left out of other local and federal funding opportunities.
COVID-19 SAFETY GUIDELINES
Per New York City's vaccine mandate, all attendees must show proof of a COVID-19 vaccine in order to be admitted to the event. Attendees are required to wear face masks throughout the performance. To read our full COVID-19 Safety Guidelines, please click here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
LOUIS DEVAUGHN NELSON (He/Him) is a Queer, Black interdisciplinary artist and the founder Hokum Arts started in 2006. Nelson has worked for 20 years as a performer, choreographer, producer, and director for film, theater, dance, and more. His works have been shown in the USA, Europe, Australia, and South Korea. He has studied at DeSales University, Drexel University, The New School, The Jeanne Ruddy School of Dance, The Koresh School of Dance, and is a proud member of The Dramatists Guild of America.
Intimate partner violence, racism, sexuality, discrimination, bigotry, misogyny, and the marginalization of class and social systems are frequent topics of Nelson's film and dance theater work. His most notable pieces were included in his three-part dance-theatre series satirizing sociopolitical warfare and sensationalism in the media in America entitled Human Error (2007), Man Bites Dog (2010), and Until Proven Guilty (2018). In all of these works, he used innovative methods combining several media/disciplines - collaborating with photographers, filmmakers, fine artists, and performing artists.
From 2019 – 2020, Nelson segued into directing theatre for festivals, including Dear Ms. Kitt at The Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, and several short plays for The Village Playwrights. He started the artist residency #4ColorsNYC at Sitting Shotgun Theatre which examines racial identity in America and began having his monologues selected for performance series at theatres nationwide. His piece Outer Inner Monologue is included in 8:46 Fresh Perspectives, a collection of Black monologues published by New World Theatre.
Since the pandemic – he has directed six theatre/dance productions for Zoom, YouTube, and Twitch with an aim to push the envelope in this time of burgeoning new media, and is currently contributing to theatre companies working in new forms like Teatro Milagro and Ignition Arts.
This program is made possible by the New York City Artist Corps.