field notes on vomiting professions, liminality, & returnings
Thoughts and reflections on the past 10 months across the ocean – on Seas of Triple Consciousness tour, reflections, notes, and interventions. This is the first one, so prepare for a long one.
“Here we are now. At the edge of a collapse.”
(words that I echoed following a timbre of the piano’s bass that rang the theater – from my performance at CTM Festival that took place in January of this year in Berlin.)
When I first began writing this newsletter back in February,
I was writing from a quiet, desolate room rich in left-behind artifacts from past guests and phantoms, outlooking the foggy and ghostly fields of rural France. I was having my third cup of coffee and was accompanied by a typewriter that has no use but to be a muse-like entity for me. This was two weeks into being away from the United States and beginning what I thought at the time was an uncertain, unconfirmed, daring 4 months away in Europe. I made a short-lived promise on my instagram story that I would share ongoing newsletters discussing the intersections between social, political, and artistic spheres in cities and countries I was inbetween–a desire I was going to carry out regardless.
Here we are 10 months later after traveling and performing across Europe, Morocco, the UK, and Istanbul, I have finally returned to the United States to Philadelphia. I immediately prepared for a performance at the Leslie Lohman Museum in NYC for November 8th–a reading of one of David Wajnarowicz’s 35 Monologues in conjunction to the current exhibition, alongside some amazing people–such as Morgan Bassichis, Nan Goldin, Zoe Leonard, Barnett Cohen, Jimmy Fay, and Ross Pasquale. This went pretty well and felt compelling, despite my recovering lag.
This newsletter, I hope, is my deep sigh of recentering my nervous system to process and gather my footing. So much has happened beyond articulation that I can’t solely express all here (it would be too long and impossible), though I will try to expand on some of the rich experiences, encounters, and things I’ve been up to.
The first draft of the newsletter earlier this year was talking about the immediate executive orders that were coming from Trump and the way it seemed to already be reverberating across emotional landscapes; the underground punks of Berlin I met and the city’s undercurrents of structures of resistance there (similar infrastructures that reminded me of Philly). This was introduced to me through its chambers of sounds and walks between them with Michail Stangl, one of the curators of the CTM Festival. I discussed the Serbian student protests I had learned about from one of the leading organizers of this ongoing struggle. Lastly, I introduced my current questions, research and practice a bit. Maybe I’ll include these reflections in my next newsletter.
Today, I write from the kitchen of a friend who is hosting me a bit outside the city to support this transition.
I also want to preface this with the heads up that this was not a luxurious time even though it can easily be romanticized and perceived as that. “Oh an artist traveling the world and performing and wow the amazing views! Gosh, they must be living the life!” I can’t deny that it was quite an experience and so many fun moments, nonetheless, I must say that not only are we all navigating an uprise of fascist regimes and far-right policies that are surveillancing, murdering, abducting, humiliating, and torturing Black, Brown, queer, trans, and marginalized communities around the world in visible and invisible ways, this also has influenced navigating borders, international policing, surveillance technology, and (in a more exciting light) subversive movements on the ground, or underground. When I’m asked how it was all, it’s mostly too overwhelming to condense into a single sentence except–turbulent.
This newsletter will be more of an essay and long journal, so grab your favorite coffee, tea, or whatever suits your attention grounding substance and enjoy the read.
I would like to give an introduction into the works that are shaping my practice right now:
My practice is currently centering performance at the intersection of sound, film, installation, and happenings, where I’m experimenting with how spontaneity, risk, and vulnerability can be used to provoke new understandings of space, power, and social relationships. It’s been bleeding into avant-theatrical pieces, public interventions, sonic compositions, and flamboyant satire that aim to render the space between fugitivity, subterranean & underworld landscapes, worldbuilding, and a kind of love poetic. There are many gay* vampiric fuck bunny professions I am writing at the moment.
For the past 10 months, the main ignitor for touring was to present a live performance of my project Seas of Triple Consciousness, my most recent full-length album released on vinyl in September of 2024 with London-based Horn of Plenty Records. I was invited to perform at a couple festivals and underground venues to start, beginning with headlining for Ganavya (which I have a personal admiration for) at CTM Festival in Berlin in January, to Real no Real Festival in Madrid, and Cafe OTO in London. The live set aimed to add dimensionality to the disembodied voices that appear in the album (MOTHER’S VOICE?) and define who is this horde I speak of–or channeled? These series of personae take front stage as they periodically interrupt my performance and offer another timeless and matterless dimensionality to assist in stripping the space and audience down to bareness.
“Essentially a song-suite, centered around grand piano with occasional percussion, harmonica, field recordings and guitar, the album starts with a world collapsing before presenting the listener with an imagined future where Jordan channels a series of personae traversing a surreal landscape unraveling its oppressive forces. With plaintive, soulful and fragile expressions of defiance, nostalgia and hope Jordan’s jaw-dropping creation is as mind-bending as it is familiar.” –HoP records
The second purpose of this trip was to continue developing, writing, and testing out Capeforce–
an ongoing shapeshifting opera and performance intervention I have been funneling my curiosities into. The work and explorations are rooted in the sonic provocations of composer and performer Julius Eastman, whom I’ve found as a flame of resonance for myself emotionally. A devilish bound traveler.
I had the pleasure of first hearing Eastman’s infamous record presenting Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger in Nick’s London apartment in the summer of 2023 during a creative blockage for the upcoming album, where I spiritually and tearfully understood “fuckkk! DAMN”–which told me everything I needed. This framework allows me to question a concept I’m developing of “guerillaness” inside and outside the container of performance, fueling fugitive improvisational movements and choreographies in public and private spaces, especially one that considers the contradictions within race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and social agency. He is now part of my spiritual family lineage, alongside Baldwin, Morrison, Alice Coltrane and others.
In this work, I am interested in sabotaged authority that revolves and relies on the agency of those witnessing and participating, forcing in a kind of intervention and ritual of collective action and negotiating social roles when “the time comes to do something”. Since I am also in a perpetual state of heartbroken lover deranged obsessions, this is finding itself intimately somewhere in everything I do. I can’t help it!
My first cohesive performance iteration of this project, capeforce ii, was performed October of 2024 in Philadelphia with Vernon Jordan III and Eden Lafayette. It was one of the most influential of my recent developments. It erupted into a performance disrupting local traffic in South Philly with a car, amp, and a triangular love pile of myself and two friends/lovers. (more in this and what erupted a little further).
Another crux of capeforce is investigating the embodiment of Edouard Glissant’s idea of Poetics of Relations. I’m not sure how this will shape as I continue to understand what resonates with me (in framing choreographies and narrative), though I’m interested in the ways it will influence the score, my worldview, and worldpositioning. I am a storyteller at heart, regardless how chaotic I lean.
I want to give this preface as an introductory space to bridge the worlds and questions I carried as I traveled and performed this past year and which continue to infest my work.
For this past year, Capeforce and Seas of Triple Consciousness offered an exciting opportunity to explore and think with other performers in basements, theaters, museums, in the street, in gutters, and in houses, what are we prepared to witness in this moment of organized chaos. What is not being tended to within us and of our countries and nations? Where do the clauses lie between the dead, spiritual realms, and our material and emotional worlds? And where are those structurally weak little fuckers trying to hold up the belief of progress? The US has it everywhere, built on genocide of those indigenous to the land and Black labor that is still actively occuring.
There is a global outcry against far-right movements taking place, while the world watches the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians. One of the questions I’m interested in is if there is an appropriate coexistence between artistic expression and action or material transformation? Maybe it’s true I’m not very interested in performance alone as much as I am in its alchemical reactions that bleed as it is experienced and in its debris and remains. However, what grounds me is the belief that there is a poetic through this moment of collapse that sees it as fertile grounds and foundations to build from.
I traveled to 11 countries and 23 cities–Germany, France, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Morocco (1 month), Portugal, United Kingdom, Spain, Turkey–Istanbul (2 months), and the Netherlands.
[ This pic I took is from the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21st in Marseille, France ]
On Seas of Triple Consciousness: Background, iterations, and reflections from Berlin to Napoli to Portugal to London
I was very pleased to see how the album was received when it was first released in September of 2024 and was delighted to see it made Hanif Abdurraqib’s top 5 album of the year for him, hehe. There’s an interesting process that this work offered me in honing my worldbuilding capacities and creating a space in which the audience and listeners can fall back into at their own will. The album also allowed some of my controlling frequencies to find a comfortable reciprocity, leaving every trace of sound and movement in the recordings an intentional spellbound weave. Its temporality functions much differently than the moment that expands, maybe even rips, space-time itself in live performance. I enjoy both equally. As the tour for this work continued through the year, I did not have the desire for the performance to imitate the album, rather, I was more interested in expanding upon it. Therefore, I continued to edit, splice, and rewrite what I was presenting, making sure it allowed for openings of improvisations and, of course, possession.
A difficulty that arose was what kind of spaces would offer me the right conditions and framing that would properly give the work the breathe and space it needed to swallow and devour as it pleased. The audience is thrown into a kind of accusation of sorts at the start of the performance, and throughout it, we (myself and the audience) are in constant negotiation of what and whom to trust. Also, the ways the content of the work could or could not be accessed depending on who was there and its relatability. I was very aware of being a Black American, performing using mostly English, in contexts where sometimes English wasn’t readily accessible and American references were not understood. I didn’t mind this so much, though it was an exciting challenge and opportunity to witness myself in.
I discovered that through what can be understood as horror opens up a vulnerable passage towards the raw emotional centers that jolts the system into a decision. That decision can either lead us towards flight or fight mode, a leaning or rejecting of, and deep frustrations that I’m finding to be such a space of potential to be moved and transformed. There’s a moment where a disruption happens in the performance and the audience is left with either witnessing or dissolving a minor violence. Maybe this provocation came out of my own frustrations of general inaction and silence throughout this year. I think this rupture is what binds us so intimately and closely from there on and after the performance happening.
After most shows, something was changed in the room. People lined up to hug me, whisper their shock, admire the phantoms present, or storm out the venue. Maybe I left some scarring, though a wound is already present.
*I am working on an East Coast and Mid West tour of the Seas of Triple Consciousness performance! If you are a promoter or would like to talk about this coming to your city, reach out :)
[photos were taken by @bicchieri.no (Daniel) from my performance in Naples, Italy, presented by Akhet collective at the Hermann Nitsch Museum.]
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SEAS OF TRIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS 2025 EUROPEAN TOUR DATES
*
January 31st // CTM Festival Berlin, Germany
February 20th // Performing Arts Forum, France
March 7th // 09h30_05h30 Antwerp, Belgium
March 13th // Stellage Athens, Greece
March 15th // Naturamorta Milan, Italy
April 18th // Trenta Formiche presented by Klang Collective Rome, Italy
April 19th // The Hermann Nitsch Museum presented by AHKET Naples, Italy
April 21st // Gada presented by Biodiversity Records & OOH-sounds Florence, Italy
May 9th // Ze dos Bois Marvila Gallery Portugal, Lisbon
May 16th // Cafe OTO London, UK
May 17th // Horse Hospital London, UK
May 18th // The Holloway Norwich, UK
May 23rd // Real no Real Festival Madrid, Spain
August 12th // Performing Arts Forum France
August 29th // DATA Marseille, France
September 27th // Perdu Amsterdam, Netherlands
September 28th // Recyclart Brussels, Belgium
PEOPLE I WANNA ACKNOWLEDGE
I didn’t do it alone. This all wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance and help, emotionally, logistically, and materially of the people I’ve encountered along the way–from offering a bed, couch, food, a ride, linking with a friend of a friend of a friend, hugs, cuddles, holding instruments, sending podcasts for long journeys, offering chats on lonely nights, and more:
(in no particular order) – Chelsey, Valentina, Neftali, Talia, Ann, Maque, Nick, Karolina, Annelise, Marcos, Machail, Juan, Renato, Julien, Delphine, Laurent, Norbert, Anton, Vanessa, Simon, Amadeo, Rose, Cristiano, Nour, Turner, Jesse, Francesca, Dalia, Federico, Ayo, the PAF community and Summer University, Fabien, Paola, Lorenzo, Alec, sanae, Jonás, Katya, Emma, Allessia, Anna, Guido, Chiara, Pablo, Miguel, Henry, Naime, Emally, Nora, Stefa, Lydia, Anna F., Carina, Clemence, Daniela, Samih, Dai Lam Tait, Lene, Maru, Graham, Allan, Francesco, Paige, LaMont, Claire, Caro, Leo, Sarah, Floris, Maya, Mari, Cansu, Serkhan, Selinay, Bulent, Arda, Baran, Mina, Nots, Orhun, Umut, Erin, Mateo, ana, Orlando, Yousef, Allesandro, Aurora, Valerio, Raziyah, Helder, Diane, Lauren D, David, and the many other encounters not here named.
This is it for now. There is much more I would like to continue sharing on a regular basis in future field notes. Until then…
Thank you and kisses,
Jordan xx