Bill Chats: Louis Chude-Sokei

Free tickets for New School students, faculty and staff, can be reserved here.
New York Live Arts presents the first Bill Chats of the 2022-2023 season featuring Nigerian-born writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in conversation with Live Arts Artistic Director Bill T. Jones. For this season, the popular series includes a partnership with The New School, where Jones has been named a 2022-2023 Presidential Visiting Scholar. The conversation will take place at New York Live Arts and also be available via livestream on December 6th, at 7pm. General public tickets are $15 for in-person and $5 for livestream, and can be purchased at NewYorkLiveArts.org or 212-691-6500, on sale now.

Chude-Sokei’s book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, was an important source of inspiration and information for the newest work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Curriculum II, which will have its NY premiere early in 2023. Jones says about this work, “I have oscillated between two or more polarities my entire career: love, mortality, and what it means to be human”. The Sound of Culture begins in the 19th Century and continues beyond the present, exploring the histories of race and technology in a world made by slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Distilling a diverse range of subject matter including minstrelsy, Victorian science fiction, cybertheory, and artificial intelligence, Chude-Sokei states that Black people have been equated with Machines. He quotes Jamaican writer and cultural theorist  Sylvia Wynter and suggests that “The other must be understood as not just that which is oppressed or marginalized or rendered inhuman, subhuman, or animal; it also must be understood ‘as that which is to come.’”

The New School’s Presidential Visiting Scholars program brings major thinkers of the highest standing to the university to teach unique courses, collaborate on creative or research initiatives, deliver lectures, and participate in public programming and other special projects. As part of this prestigious appointment, Live Arts and The New School will collaborate on a series of events including public conversations, performances, classes, etc, that explore urgent and intersectional questions in these unsettling times, including identity, artist/citizen, community, climate justice. Additional programming this winter and spring to be announced.