Frida Kahlo Boléro Meets Transnational Feminisms

The session opens with a dance performance accompanied by live-music, Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo Boléro. It evokes an artist whose biography and legacy often represents “crossroads” between aesthetics, gender identities, cultural belongings, and spiritual worlds. Oxana Chi‘s choreography takes the famous Béjart Boléro as its starting point while blending ballet with Caribbean bélè dance and German movement styles. Layla Zami‘s sounds on the saxophone and loops are rooted in classical and contemporary music with a touch of jazz and Caribbean grooves. Dr. Zami, a former Pratt faculty member, contextualizes the performance from a transnational feminist perspective with a talk addressing tropes of sensuality/desire, transgression and (a)temporal spiraling in Kahlo’s work. Extending out from this frame, the lecture-performance also explores the interrelations between bodies, homes, and historical trauma in contemporary visual art by Black diasporic women. The second half of this event engages students and other audience members in conversation.

Dr. Layla Zami is an interdisciplinary academic and artist born in Paris with a Caribbean-Jewish heritage. Her research, teaching, and creative work orbit around cultural memory, diaspora, performance (studies), art (history), and spacetime. She is professor of entangled art and performance history at the Campus Caraïbéen des Arts in Martinique, and is in charge of the graduate research seminar and curriculum design. An award-winning educator, Zami taught at Pratt Institute, where she co-chaired Black Lives Matter at Pratt. Other appointments include NYU Berlin, Columbia University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she earned her PhD in transdisciplinary gender studies and a teaching award. Her book Contemporary PerforMemory (2020) received the Honorable Mention for the Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research (2023). Zami creates and performs music/sounds/theater for Oxana Chi Dance & Art. Together, the duo has gratefully and gracefully performed at universities, theaters and festivals across the globe.

Oxana Chi is an internationally active dancer-choreographer, curator, filmmaker and visual artist born in Germany of Eastern Nigerian and Eastern European descent. Her repertoire comprises 20 productions, including commissions for The Kitchen New York and Humboldt-University Berlin. Chi taught choreography at Freie Universität Berlin and was a guest teaching artist at NYU. Her international tour history includes Volksbühne Berlin, BAAD!, Delhi International Queer Theatre and Film Festival, University of Washington, and University of Ghana. Chi was a keynote performer at the Black German Heritage & Research Association Conference (University of Toronto, 2018) and the University of Ghana, Legon. She held residencies at institutions such as Abrons Arts Center and co-curated Dance for the International Human Rights Art Festival. Chi is listed in The Dance Enthusiast‘s “A to Z of People Who Power The Dance World” (2018) and received the Performance Studies international award (2023). Her work appears in Black Lives Under Nazism (2024) and Afrodiasporic Identities in Germany (2024). She authored Sichtbar Bleiben: Black Lesbian Archives Matter!