AFTERWORDS: assembly—mayfield brooks
Monday, April 14, 2025 at 12:00pm
Jones Room, Theater Studios, 275 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.
The third event in the AFTERWORDS series of public talks will feature the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence mayfield brooks. Presented in conjunction with the course THEA 275 "All Together Now: Theater and Theatricality" taught by Director of the Center for the Arts and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Joshua Lubin-Levy '06.
In their recent work Whale Fall, brooks has been researching whales and the ways in which they move as a collective through their watery worlds, sing to each other, grieve the death of their children, and feed new ecologies deep in the oceans when they die (through a process known as “whale fall.”) Over the course the 2025–2026 academic year, brooks will work closely with the CFA as they complete this series and begin a new project on the interconnectedness of shorelines through legacies of colonial extraction and ecological decay, as well as practices of rest and renewal. In this new work, ocean tides, waves, and shorelines are inspiration for how we dance together and apart. What is the body’s shoreline like? How can different ecologies of cellular integration emerge through voice, sound, and movement? Embracing practices and politics of grief, loss, and decomposition, brooks uses dance and movement to explore the entangled relations of human and non-human worlds.
A full schedule of residency events will be shared in the summer of 2025. Student, faculty, staff, and community members interested in learning more about brooks’ residency are welcome to reach out directly to Joshua Lubin-Levy at jlubinlevy@wesleyan.edu.
AFTERWORDS is the Center for the Arts' public program series, asking: what happens after the encounter with the work of art? Each year, AFTERWORDS is organized around a keyword addressing different dimensions of art’s capacity to not only reflect but to transform the world. To assemble is both to come together and to make or construct. These two meanings are inextricable: to come together is to make something (like a “we”) out of nowhere; to make or construct something out of other things rests on the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. How does art take up this power of assembly? How does it call assemblies into being? And, in the wake of what art helps us assemble, what other work remains to be done? Learn more about AFTERWORDS: assembly events.
mayfield brooks improvises while Black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. 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; a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist; and recent Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. brooks received a BA from Trinity College, an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and an MFA from the University of California, Davis. They also studied somatics and social change at the Moving on Center School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Research, and contemporary dance at the School for New Dance Development in the Netherlands. mayfield brooks thanks their human and nonhuman ancestors for watching over them and protecting them.
Photo by Ian Douglas