The Center for Fiction Presents Happiness: A Rite and a Book by Choreographer Edisa Weeks

Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT November 6, 2024

The Center for Fiction

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Join us for a multidisciplinary, interactive exploration of happiness featuring prose, poetry, video, and movement curated by Brooklyn-based choreographer Edisa Weeks, creator of the 3 RITES performance rituals and Accordion Booklets.

Weeks’s 3 RITES: LIFE, LIBERTY, HAPPINESS is an interactive performance trilogy that examines how these “inalienable” rights manifest in America and in the body. A piece of visual art and a partner to the HAPPINESS rite, the accordion booklet Happiness + Happiness is Happiest When Shared features poetry, illustrations, and photography documenting the creative process of the rite.

At the event, Weeks will discuss the Happiness booklet with Darryl Hell—filmmaker and collaborator on the HAPPINESS rite—and poet/literary theorist Rosamond S. King. After the conversation, she will share the short film seeds and small gestures (featuring poetry by Thomas F. DeFrantz and music by Nathaniel Braddock), which is a part of the original HAPPINESS rite and an intimate remembering of childhood joy, friendship, laughter—and lead the group in “laughtercises”.

The evening will offer a dynamic ritual of creating happiness in community. A limited number of books will be available for sale.

Featuring

Edisa Weeks

Edisa Weeks

Edisa Weeks is a Brooklyn, NY based choreographer, educator, curator and founder of DELIRIOUS Dances. Edisa makes multimedia interactive work, that merges theater with dance to explore our deepest desires, darkest fears and sweetest dreams. Her work has been performed in a variety of venues including the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum, and Weeksville Heritage Center; as well as in swimming pools, storefront windows, senior centers, sidewalks and living rooms, including living rooms in Berlin, Germany, as part of Haus der Kulturen der Welts 50th anniversary celebration. She grew up in Uganda, Papua New Guinea and Brooklyn, NY. She has received multiple awards including a 2022 Creative Capital Grant, and a 2024 MAP grant. Edisa has performed with Annie–B Parsons Big Dance Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co., Dance Brazil, Homer Avila, Jane Comfort, Jon Kinzel, Muna Tseng, Reggie Wilson Fist & Heel Performance Group, Sally Silvers, Spencer/Colton Dance, among others. She is on the Board of Directors for Movement Research and teaches modern technique, improvisation, choreography and mentors emerging artists at Queens College/CUNY. deliriousdances.com
Thomas F. DeFrantz

Thomas F. DeFrantz

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.
Darryl Hell

Darryl Hell

Darryl Hell aka Darryl Montgomery is a polymath that has existed on many sides of the entertainment industry, as an artist, performer, and management [since 1972]; who made his mark in the early days of the New York City/New Jersey punk scene [1979-1984]; began his work in grassroots community development as a child of a socially engaged Black family; founded an underground industrial production network called sektor 6 kommunikations in 1989; and is one of the co-founders of chashama with Anita Durst. He is a teacher advisor for Exploring the Arts and teaches theater production & media literacy at Bronx Academy of Letters, a public high school.
Rosamond S. King

Rosamond S. King

Rosamond S. King is a critical and creative writer and performance artist whose scholarly work focuses on sexuality, performance, and literature in the Caribbean and Africa. Her book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the Caribbean Studies Association best book award, and her research has been supported by the Fulbright and Ford, Mellon, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations. King is the author of poetry collections All the Rage and the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone. Her writing has also been published in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, including The Feminist Wire, Hyperallergic, The Caribbean Writer, and The New Daughters of Africa. She is the Carol L. Zicklin Honors Academy Chair at Brooklyn College.

Photo Credit: Iryna Fedorovska