mayfield brooks by Nir Arieli.
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mayfield brooks curates OPEN STUDIOS, inviting Kate Williams, Maho Ogawa, Rochelle Jamila, and AJ Wilmore to present work from their unique practices and experiments in dance & performance.
PROGRAM
Maho Ogawa: “Nothing to Watch”
“Nothing to Watch” is a performance inspired by Japanese Tea Ritual and Zen meditation.
From Maho Ogawa: “In 2022, I began researching the Japanese Tea Ritual, visited Zen gardens and the historic Japanese Tea House, designed by the pioneer Tea Master, Sen-no Rikyu, in Kyoto. I then conducted a survey about people's daily rituals in New York to explore the connection between Japanese Tea / Zen culture and the local community in New York. Research and results from the survey, along with an overview of Japanese Tea Culture, and an interview with a Japanese Tea Master, were published as an online magazine, “a place where individuals become a whole,” by Culture Push.
At CPR, I'll invite dancers to experiment with incorporating the practice of Zen meditation into choreographic scores.”
Kate Williams: Tender and Technical
Featuring Reed Rushes and Iliana Penichet-Ramírez with Sound Design/Sound Mixing by Raphael Lelan-Cox.
"She opens her eyes and sees…everything
And she can’t believe it.
In her head her voice sounds loud, but it’s barely coming through, or maybe it is but it’s hard for her to tell.
She never got to say goodbye, and the feelings are starting to trickle through the cracks.
Maybe she waved and just can’t remember.
Through hyper femininity, the overdramatization of mundaneness, and humor I explore the grief within myself and within connection. With two dancers joining me, they are wearing white morph suits in order to blend in with the background; it’s an illusion-there’s someone there, but also no one there.
I reach my hand out to…
waiting………"
Rochelle Jamila: it’s easy to be soft, like cotton
In it's easy to be soft, like cotton Rochelle turns to her roots in the Mississippi delta to unravel and re-fabricate her relationship with cotton and cotton based textiles. The cotton plant has an over 5000 year history of cultivation and collaboration with humans, but for Black Americans with roots in the US South, cotton can evoke the traumas of enslavement, sharecropping, and Jim Crow. Rochelle channels the energy of this sacred plant, the Mother (Mississippi) River, and ancient textile practices to process this inherited dissonance and seek solace in cotton's soft and wise medicine.
AJ Wilmore: dolla party
dolla party is an attempt to recall dances AJ did outside of (in)formal dance training and a peek into the practices they were building as a young girl growing up in Philly. It guides the viewer through a night of clubbing at 12 years old—an activity where pre-teens and teenagers would attend late-night “dolla parties” in various makeshift venues around the city. This particular night unfolded in the basement of a home shared by several teenage brothers. The choreography also draws inspiration from the movements of the Fly Girls, the dance group featured on the 90s sketch comedy show In Living Color.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
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 currently a Creative Time Research & Development fellow. They love living by the sea.
Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in New York. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, "Minimum Movement Catalog". Ogawa uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.
Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture. She crafts public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about "silence," providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community.
Maho's works have been shown in Korea, Japan, and in the U.S., including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Center for Performance Research, to name a few.
Ogawa is the recipient of the Artist-In-Residence program at Movement Research (2024-2026) and MOtiVe (2025-2026).
Kate Williams is a multi-media artist. Her work centers around movement improvisation and choreography as well as designing clothing. She started her process of “dance” in college, where she began her focus into narrative dialogues based on personal experiences. Through movement she has been making it a part of her practice to learn how to further express and delve into these experiences. She is a self-taught sewist, making her own clothing since high school.
Kate’s work is to merge her two practices at the center of expression—using clothing and wardrobe she creates as a sculptural element of her movement work. In addition to making her own costumes-she does commissioned seamstressing work: tailoring, personal commissions, and costuming entire shows.
She has performed in various places around New York City, and toured internationally. Currently, she is one half of the performance duo ‘Star & Stan,’ alongside her partner Reed Rushes. She is also a part of the management team, as well as a member, of Otion Front Studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She attended Bard College (May 2020) where she was a joint major of Dance and Human Rights with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Rochelle Jamila is a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary performer, dancemaker, and healing artist hailing from Memphis, Tennessee. Rochelle’s work imagines liberation and pleasure through human and ecological fertility, by sounding, dancing, and ritualizing the psychic worlds of women. She is particularly inspired by her heritage and upbringing in the Mississippi River Delta. Her work has been presented in Tennessee, New York, the Netherlands, and at venues such as Judson Church, Snug Harbor Botanical Garden, Triskelion Arts, The Buckman Theater, University of Amsterdam, and Harriet’s Gun Dance Film Festival. Rochelle was a 2024 Resident at A Studio in the Woods, a recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council’s 2024 Creative Equations Cultural Heritage & Dance Fund, and a 2025 Movement Research Van Lier Fellow. She has performed in works by Ebony Noelle Golden, Adia Whitaker, Jasmine Hearn, Beth Gill, Ambika Raina, and Maria Bauman among others. She is currently a member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Reggie Wilson Fist & Heel Performance Group. Rochelle graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in Dance and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In her free time Rochelle enjoys frolicking out of doors, communing with water, studying herbalism, and weaving.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, on the land known as Lenapehoking, the ancestral home of the Lenni-Lenape people, AJ Wilmore is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose practice is shaped by questions of storytelling, identity, and the complexities of Black familial relationships. A 2020 graduate of The University of the Arts, AJ has performed in works by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ralph Lemon, Joan Jonas, Isabel Lewis, and MBDance. Their performances have been presented at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Abrons Arts Center, MoMA and MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Judson Memorial Church, and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. A 2025 Dancing While Black Fellow, AJ recently premiered their first experimental film, Untitled (434). Their practice—driven by making love to their fears—investigates the stakes, texture, and vulnerability of their social and sexual life.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.