A collaboration between Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley.
Project O (the collaborative supernova between Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small) make work that aims to continually address, reevaluate, intervene, comment upon, resist and celebrate the fallout from being born black, mixed and female in 21st Century UK. As a starting point they shift as they look, converse and interrogate what they see and feel.
Their work is driven by our engagement with dance practices but the creative outcome includes works ranging from shows for theatres to performance lectures, free schools and DJ sets. Project O experiment with alternative ways their bodies can be present and visible (on stage or off), and ways that they can be present and visible in our bodies for ourselves. One of their compositional enquiries is around inviting audiences to consider their own shifting positions and identities - an attempt to acknowledge that all are complicit in these systems of oppression.
“The ghosts of past persecutions, present realities, and future possibilities are embodied in these two figures who are both themselves and all of us, simultaneously.”
Being resident at Somerset House Studios gives Project O their first stable base. Alexandrina also runs Yewande 103 and Jamila works as SERAFINE1369 (previously known as Last Yearz Interesting Negro)."
