Jamila Johnson-Small (UK), also known as Last Yearz Interesting Negro, is an artist and performer. She uses the choreographic space s social space in order to facilitate immersive, emergent spaces for performer/s and spectator/s. Her coreographies work through questions of presence, visibility, responsibility and pleasure; building atmospheric landscapes through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning, for situating and expanding (or dismantling) their ‘identity’ and turning it into theatre.

She dances, writes, curates, and hosts spaces for conversation and artistic exchange. Johnson-Small collaborates with other artists like Alexandrina Hemsley as Project O, and Phoebe Collings-James. The latter resulted “Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival”, a performance at Wysing Arts Centre (UK) where the duo physically charted “psycho-emotional landscapes” using multi-dimensional bodies as technology across dance, music and sculpture.

 

Photo: Wilf Speller

Collage: Phoebe Collings-James