For our first New Orleans event in our long-form Living Equipment series, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Triple Canopy invite you to attend Power to the Parade, featuring Ryan C. Clarke and Will Rawls in conversation and collaboration. Collaging film, music, discussion, and movement, Clarke and Rawls will ask: what methodologies are encrypted in our bodies? What camouflage is rendered by the marriage of satire and grief? By harnessing the disruptive trickster energy to consider Black dance, footwork, and congregation as improvised, ritual play as well as the writings of New Orleanian, cultural organizer, poet, essayist, and playwright Tom Dent, Clarke and Rawls offer a foundation for their conceptions of the Black syntax of mobilization and organization.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
at The Ellis Marsalis Center
1901 Bartholomew Street,
New Orleans, Louisiana,
at 6:15pm CT (doors open at 5:45pm CT)
This program is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at our Eventbrite link to register and learn more.
Living Equipment, led by Ryan C. Clarke, is a sequence of conversations, listening sessions, and performances devoted to minor histories and radical resonances of Black Electronic music, presented by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Triple Canopy. For more details about our program, visit this link.
Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist based in New Orleans and one of the co-curators and co-organizers of Dweller Festival, as well as the co-editor of the Dweller Electronics blog.
Will Rawls is a multidisciplinary choreographer, dancer, and writer. In 2023, his performance and video installation, [siccer], toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Momentary, On the Boards, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and premiered in a joint presentation between ICA-LA and REDCAT in April 2025. Other recent presentations include the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, Counterpublic 2023 and Liste Art Fair. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Herb Alpert Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, United States Artists, Rauschenberg Foundation, and MacDowell Colony, and his writing has been published by the Hammer Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and Dancing While Black Journal. He is currently Associate Professor of Choreography and Interdisciplinary Practice in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Rawls is a Rivers-Amistad Research Resident for Spring 2025.
In New Orleans, Living Equipment is sponsored by The Henry Luce Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and The Terra Foundation for American Art. In New York, events were sponsored by a Humanities New York Action Grant and Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color, co-founded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation.