Corpuscular Cores

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an influential composer and musician navigating the im/possibility to work at the core of the minimalist music scene in the United States while being an unapologetically gay Black man. In Corpuscular Cores, Oxana Chi and Layla Zami perform dance and music in resonance with Eastman’s life and legacy, and in response to a graphic score designed by Romi Morrison as part of the project Song Book: The Quotient of Desire, commissioned by the Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency in New York.

Oxana Chi is a German dancer, choreographer, curator, writer, filmmaker, and trendsetter. Her work explores how our present is built upon in/visible remnants from the past, and its porous relation to our futures. She founded her company in Berlin in 1991 and was based in New York for several years. Her rich repertoire of 20+ productions comprises commissioned works for Humboldt-University, The Kitchen NYC, and Leo-Baeck-Institute (Transitions Festival). She has performed at arts spaces and universities worldwide. Honors and awards include: Performance Studies international Award (2023), Ambassador of Peace DOSHIMA Jakarta (2016), and being listed in The Dance Enthusiast’s A to Z of People Who Power the Dance World (NYC 2018). As a filmmaker, Chi produced the film Dancing Through Gardens with support from the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah (Paris). She published writing with Orlanda Frauenverlag, transcript Publishing, and in the peer-reviewed Dance Research Journal. Chi has 30+ experience as an educator and was a 2022 guest faculty in the Dance Department at New York University.

Dr. Layla Zami (Paris, 1985) is an interdisciplinary academic and artist, whose work orbits around the nexus of cultural memory, performance, diaspora, language, and spacetime. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts). Zami spent several years in NY, where she was Adj. Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Co-Chair of Black Lives Matter at Pratt Institute. The author of Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century (Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research Honorable Mention 2023), she obtained her PhD in Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-University, where she also earned a Teaching Award, and was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. Zami graduated from Sciences Po Paris and holds a Diploma in Classical Saxophone. She studied jazz with Parageet and Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq, and played in the Big Band of the Berlin University of the Arts. As a Resident Artist with Oxana Chi Dance & Art, Zami accompanies the choreographies with music, spoken words, theater, presentations and more. The duo has gratefully and gracefully performed in many universities, theatres, and festivals in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America.