mayfield brooks
Viewing Hours
Ticketed Performance
Laurel Hill West, check-in for the performance at the Conservatory
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Through Viewing Hours I aim to challenge perceptions of death and decay—specifically the spectacle of black bodies dying, decaying, and grieving in plain sight—in order to transform people’s thinking around what becomes possible, inevitable, and necessary when systems break down. Viewing Hours challenges the currency and flippancy that makes black death and black grief profitable. We are now faced with the dissolution of sociopolitical systems touting blatant white supremacy and ecological systems altered by climate change, while human physiological systems become more vulnerable. Humans are facing unspeakable violence and greed. Shit is breaking down. As a black queer artist hustling to make ends meet, breaking down is the norm, so burying my body under compost functions as a trickster tactic of my ongoing life/art practice, Improvising While Black /IWB which is a practice of telling stories that cannot be told through movement and vocal improvisation. Viewing Hours challenges people to witness with great attention. Viewing Hours asks, Can I get a Witness or Does the world need to be destroyed first?
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mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.