P(O/U)NK

Overview

P(O/U)NK is an exploration of black queer anarchism through movement and sound. Seals and his collaborators wrestle with the fugitivity of black queer liveness to reckon with violent pasts and imagine liberated futures. P(O/U)NK uses movement and sound to create a landscape of improvisational practices/promiscuous futuring/emergent strategies towards dispelling shame associated with touch and illuminating a unified culture of black queer legacy. What does it mean to show affection, exhibit sensuality, and/or flirt with an imagination of a future with a loved one, or maybe someone you might/should/hope to love? How do you initiate that touch/kiss/grind/hug? Sustain it? When to let go? How do these initiations snowball into cultural practices? What does it do to form when we ossify it? In a Cisgender Heteronormative Christofascist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal society that mobilizes shame into systemic violence, how can identifying cultural practices in black social dance and queer intimacy illuminate legacy and further our understanding of consensual touch? This research will culminate as a series of meditations and rituals that utilize movement and sound derived from social dance, cruising culture, and contact improvisation (i really wanted to say nigga shit, butt stuff, and raging against the machine) to create a happening that invites participants to explore their relationship to touch and intimacy. P(O/U)NK bumps and grinds into a future of radical care using live sound, dance, and consent practices.

Note: the 9/11 performance of this show has been canceled.

About the Artist

Cory Seals is an interdisciplinary artist and community curator born in Atlanta and based in Philadelphia. Seals practices include vocal jazz, sonic landscape, and improvisation with voice, text, and movement. His work is an expression of radical care and community building for the diversely interconnected experiences of Black and Queer life. Alongside his own current projects, Seals is a cast member of Faye Driscolls latest work, Weathering. He has had the pleasure of studying with Reginald Pindell, Paul Adkins, V. Shayne Frederick, Marguerite Hemmings, Curt Haworth, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Pietro Gagliano, Marta Bellu, and Nicki & Jorge Cousineau, amongst others. For more info visit coryseals.com