PLACE:

New Orleans, LA

BIO:

paris cyan cian is a movement architect, educator, and bodypoet working with and through various interdisciplinary forms of dance, drawing, film, photography, and sound. Rooted in New Orleans, cyan’s creative work mobilizes embodied memory and ecological play into a worldmaking practice. cyan cian received her BFA/BA in Dance with a concentration in social justice, gender women’s studies from Hollins University (2018) and Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography at Roehampton University, London, U.K (2021).

PROJECT:

modjeskamodjeskamodjeska is a multisite multidisciplinary durational performance installation calling attention to the erosion of the Louisiana coastline. In this installation, we investigate the activation of prayer and honor the restorative practice of oyster-body as a tool for ancestral protection of land and memory. This piece pays homage to traditional and indigenous New Orleans memorial and masquerade practices as regenerative ways of homemaking, celebrating the ecosystem that is Blackness; the restorative land-oyster-body.

Calling upon the oyster vessel and the hurricane cycle as conduits for communication for ancestral veneration, modjeskamodjeskamodjeska, comments on the life cycles of the oyster as coastal habitat and body, the Land body of Louisiana, and Black girlhood; all vulnerable due to systems of impact and abrupt change.

This piece seeks to combine movement, moving image, masquerade regalia fashioned from recycled oyster shells, and poetic sonic repetition as tools for storytelling and worldbuilding. Gathered amongst collective in the streets of New Orleans, modjeskamodjeskamodjeska, is created by Black and queer artists who generate worlds for ceremony. We gather to engage in conversation about the call of the Hurricane, our Mutha’s/home/land memory, water levels and land erosion – our beginnings and our changes; cuz these hurricanes keep on comin’ and comin’.