Malik Gaines will be presenting ideas, images and interpretations from his dissertation, Radical Differences: 1960s Performance, Gender Eccentricity, and the Black Transnational Imagination this Saturday.
Gaine’s study contemplates performances from different national contexts that each mobilized the era’s discourse of black liberation politics, but radically transformed that project through gendered representations. Artists discussed include Nina Simone, Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Aidoo, Günther Kaufmann, Sylvester, and Elaine Brown. Gaines, who has conducted this work in the Theater and Performance Studies Ph.D. program at UCLA, is known for his own performance work with My Barbarian, as well as other writing and curatorial projects in the field of contemporary art.
We’re predicting a video screening, a presentation and maybe a song or two performed by Malik on his keyboard this Saturday.