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Join us for two live performances on First Thursday, May 7, 6 – 7 PM at ARTS at King Street Station! Part of XX – The Patternmaster: An Afrofuturist Ritual for Collective Dreaming, the evening features a dynamic performance by dancer and choreographer Akoiya Harris alongside a powerful literary offering from Garfield Hillson. Attendees will also have the opportunity to experience the immersive soundscape created by DJ Summersoft for the exhibition, via QR Code.
Akoiya Harris at On the Boards, photo by Allina Yanh
Akoiya Harris is a movement artist based in Seattle, Washington. Her work uses a queer Black gaze to explore ways communal and personal stories can be interwoven into dance works. As a choreographer, she has shown work at the Seattle Art Museum, Wa Na Wari, On The Boards, Friends of the Waterfront, Velocity Dance Center, The Moore Theater, and more. Akoiya is a founding member of Black Collectivity, a group that explores memory and culture through embodied responses. Following a matriarchal lineage of teachers, Akoiya is a dance educator working with youth at Ailey Camp and Pacific Northwest Ballet. She has also taught at Cornish College of the Arts, and University of Washington.
Garfield Hillson
Originally from South Florida, Garfield Hillson is a Black-Queer poet and educator working in Seattle. He believes in trauma-informed social justice healing and that art and education are the building blocks to achieve this. Garfield imagines being Black and queer is nothing if not a study in silence, so he writes to reclaim the language that was stolen from him, to empower others, and to push imaginations to craft a better now. Garfield is a Seattle Poetry Slam Grand Slam Champion (2015); a Rain City Slam Grand Slam Champion (2017); and a five-time Seattle Poetry Slam National Team Member (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). Garfield has appeared in Rising Up: A Queer Social Justice Play (2017); and Dear White People—Resistance (2018).
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