jaamil olawale kosoko
Voncena’s Spell
June 20–22, 2025
Voncena’s Spell is a dance performance about memory, Black futures, queer histories, and ecological grief. Set aboard the spacecraft Voncena in a near-future galaxy, an alternatively intelligent being – named after the artist’s deceased mother – awakens.
Showtimes
Image by Freddy Koh
Accessibility
About
Blending choreography, live music, ASMR, and multimedia installation, Voncena’s Spell work transports audiences into a speculative realm where an AI entity—named Voncena (embodying the artist’s deceased mother) awakens to her own sentient power. The genre-defying work unearths the intersections of technology, Black feminist poetics, and spiritual transformation, conjuring a space where the past, present, and future collapse into one. This immersive experience invites audiences to engage with the unseen forces that shape Black existence, love, and liberation.
About jaamil olawale kosoko
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. kosoko moves across the creative realms of performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. Through rooted ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko seeks to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care.
jaamil’s works—including The (chrysalis) Archives (2024), Black Body Amnesia (2022), Chameleon (The Living Installments) (2020), Séancers (2017), and the Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia (2015)—have toured extensively to internationally recognized venues and festivals throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Africa.
jaamil is the recipient of several awards including an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Arts and Technology Lab award, Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short film, La Becque Artists Residency (Switzerland), two MacDowell Fellowships, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship among many others. Visit jaamil.com for more information.
Funding
Voncena’s Spell is commissioned by Abrons Arts Center with additional funding and support from Doris Duke Performing Arts and Technology Lab, The Center for the Advancement in Public Action at Bennington College, Pearl Arts Studios (Pittsburgh), MAP Fund, LMCC Extended Life program, MacDowell, Subcircle Residency, La Becque Residency (Switzerland), PCT Fellowship, UT Austin Visiting Lecture Residency, Black Hole Hollow, and friends of kosoko performance studio.