JAZZMORPHIA:
TRACES, THRESHOLDS, & THEATER-MAKING
Painting
MY EPHEMERAL WALL: TOWARDS A BLACK SUN
My Ephemeral Wall was a project I began in Berlin, Germany. It is a durational project in which I sought to transpose what I experience in jazz music through movement and painting on a wall canvas over a period of weeks. As I worked through the project, the black sun continued to remerge and become a central principle in my work that declaims, “Blackness is its own way of being, knowing, and has its own luminance.” At a certain point, it became clear to me that I needed to position my Black body in the work that I was doing. My Ephemeral Wall not only became a metaphor for my practice and the nature of performance but serves as an embodied manifesto of enduring and thriving in self-exile. In Chicago, I was asked to bring my performance-art and its ashes to the Porous Gallery, a tiny gallery space at Columbia College in which I was allowed the space to perform my practice daily, record and photograph the series and invite audiences to witness. **Below is a sampling of this project.
Mini-video of Johann Painting
Acting
DANCING JELLY ROLL MORTON
Jelly’s Last Jam, Summer 2019
It was an honor working with Hattiloo Theatre, one of the few all-Black spaces in the US. The community was vibrant and welcoming. The provocation of this role and show around the struggles of colorism in our community was powerfully expressed through all the acting, song, and dance brought by the talented and amazing cast. Director Dennis Whitehead-Darling was a beautiful collaborator. I was honored to also be acknowledged by the larger Memphis area as they awarded my work with the 2020 Ostrander’s Memphis Theatre Award for Best Lead in a Musical.
A Devised Performance Film
QUEER MAKISHI
Queer Makishi – is a triple-conscious journey through morning rituals of awakening. This Black-mixed-queer performance activates auto-ethnographic memory, absurd fantasy, and spiritual contemplation through music, language, movement, and visual montage.
Queer Makishi wrestles with divergent masks from the traditions of clowning, minstrelsy, drag, camp, and absurdism in an attempt to reconcile these multiple selves in relationship to the Mother-Goddess, Oshun, and the trickster god, Legba. This piece seeks to explore the fragmented self of triple-consciousness as represented through the author’s persona. Finally, Queer Makishi celebrates the simultaneity and complexity these multiple selves bring to the crossroads of transformation.
MFA Thesis: Queer Makishi, performed in the second annual ThirdMask Festival in conjunction with Columbia College Chicago’s 2020 MFA in European Devised Performance Practice cohort.
Associated Publication: Wood, Johann Robert. “Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-positions, and Devised Performance Practice.” In Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation. eds. Yana Meerzon and Julia Listengarten. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2021.
Full Queer Makishi 7:00 and 11:35
Full Queer Makishi Film
Creative Research Presentation Video
Directing
As an Artist-in-Residence, Johann directed, what he called, a “jazz queering” of “It’s a Wonderful Life - A Live Radio Play” with improvisational jazz accompaniment centering Black queer jazz vocalist and musicians of the 1940s. Proposing a mix of drag, camp, and film noir aesthetics, he cast the radio personalities of the play across gender binaries to “trouble” this American classic and to celebrate queer survival and joy.
Click here: Director’s Notes from 2021 UVM Playbill
Photo of UVM’s IAWL Cast (From top left): Kaia Jefferson, Johann Robert Wood, Alessia Potovsky, Maddie Leitch, Sarah Wasserman, Mitchell Wahlberg, Marty Gnidula, B.K. Bady-Kaye, Isabel Martine, Connor Eaton, Josh Huffman.
From UVM Instagram post: “UVM Theatre and Dance presents “It’s a Wonderful Life - A Live Radio Play….this holiday classic tells the story you know, of idealistic George Bailey as he considers ending his life one fateful Christmas Eve, in a way you’ve never seen. With a diverse cast cast that brings dozens of characters to life, foley artists creating sound effects that includes sirens, a blizzard and women wallking in heels, voguing dancers and a live jazz combo, the black and white classic becomes a dazzling evening of theatre in all the colors of the rainbow." (November 29, 2021)
Poster Design by: Riley Mulroy
DEVISED WORK-IN-PROGRESS SHOWINGS
DEMO: FIRST DRIFT
After a psychogeographic exploration of my new neighborhood in Chicago, I built a series of physical movement scores that shared my night wanderings: contemplating neighborhoods as forms of incarceration for so many people of color, listening to the sounds of the night, and using a rug (which was a found object on my adventures) as the foundation of a dramaturgical device. Unrolling each new scene of the piece, my cohort and I created collectively with visiting director, Dr. Ariel Gutierrez Torres.
EARTH FORENSICS: MIGRATION ONE
Earth Forensics is an experiment in which I explore the death of the earth. It is a short romance, and as forensic scientists enter, the audience begins to question - “Who’s responsible?” as a gigantic projected eye glares on.
REVELATION MARS PROJECT
With my fellow MFA Cohort, we explored and devised themes that took us to Mars in search of water. We met ancient alien beings, a melodramatic captain, a space-nerd techie, and a Granny with a kinky secret. My character, the Astronaut, wrestles with self-exile and existential questions that both attract and repel him to his home, planet earth.
Here is an excerpt of my own writing from the Astronaut’s monologue as he searches for water:
400 days. 8 square miles. Still not water. We’re running out of time.I met a man in Africa once…a desert poet. Said the job of the poet was to remember where the water holes are. “The Survival of the whole tribe depends on it,” he said. When the people forget, the poet leads ‘em back to the water. I gotta find some water.(Goes back to digging around in the dirt looking for samples.)I have seen this red soil before. In Mississippi, it runs soft and wet. In Africa, it's like bloodstained chalk. In Israel, time and war and religion have turned it into stone.Stone, and dirt, and something more….Went to Israel to search for Jesus. He was calling to me. And I felt him there. Touched him in the dirt.It’s been 400 days. Nothing. Never been good with numbers, but I remember 400. 400 are the years the Hebrew children were enslaved in Egypt. 400 are the years of the transatlantic slave trade. 400 are the years since my ancestors arrived to work the red Virginia class. I mean, I know dirt.You ever heard of Mississippi mud pie? Soil is dark, rich, root-filled with sorrow. Dirt, dirt, dirt. Always dirt. Holding me between these places. Holding me together. it’s a part of me now. Like my skin…red and brown and mixed.
BLACK SUN DEVISING PROJECT: QUEENS. UNRAVELING.
After founding and directing this ensemble in Chicago, our time together was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In honor of our work and the piece that never came to be, I acknowledge the work and talent of my ensemble: Torri Bell, Isaiah Engram, and Carrita Fields.
Each one of these thrones inspired a movement score for each of the performers - stories & songs from their childhood, & a host of inspiration around Black joy, love, & royalty.