Bill Chats: Kamilah Forbes & Niegel Smith

Presented in partnership with The New School

JAN 30, 7PM

Bill T. Jones in conversation with Executive Producer of the Apollo Theater, Kamilah Forbes and Artistic Director of The Flea Theater, Niegel Smith.

The New School’s Presidential Visiting Scholars program brings major thinkers of the highest standing to the university to teach unique courses, collaborate on creative or research initiatives, deliver lectures, and participate in public programming and other special projects. As part of this prestigious appointment, Live Arts and The New School are collaborating on a series of events including public conversations, performances, classes, etc, that explore urgent and intersectional questions in these unsettling times, including identity, artist/citizen, community, climate justice.

Funding

Bill Chats is supported in part by Partners for New Performance

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Biographies

Bill T. Jones (Artistic Director/ Co-Founder/Choreographer: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; Artistic Director: New York Live Arts) is recipient of the 2022 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for Black No More;

2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; 2013 National Medal of Arts; 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed Fela!; a 2007 Tony Award,

2007 Obie Award, and 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Callaway Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; 2007 USA

Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship;

2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for The Seven; 2005 Wexner Prize; the

2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 2010,

Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.” Bill has been nominated for the 2022 Tony Awards for his work on Paradise Square.

Jones choreographed and performed worldwide with his late partner, Arnie Zane, before forming the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982. He has created more than 140 works for his company. Jones is Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an organization that strives to create a robust framework in support of the nation’s dance and movement-based artists through new approaches to producing, presenting, and educating.

Kamilah Forbes is an esteemed award-winning director and producer for theater and television. She currently serves as the Executive Producer at the World-Famous Apollo Theater in Harlem. In her diverse body of work, Kamilah is noted for having a strong commitment to the development of creative works by, for, and about the Hip-Hop generation.

This Howard University alum has won awards for both directing and producing, including the 2019 NBTF Larry Leon Hamlin Producer Award and an NAACP Image Award.

Kamilah’s directing credits include By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, written by Lynn Nottage Blood Quilt written by Katori Hall, and “Sunset Baby” written by Dominique Morrisseau. She has also worked closely with Kenny Leon on The Wiz Live, A Raisin in the Sun, Mountaintop, and Stick Fly on Broadway. She has produced several works for television, most notably the seventh season of the Tony Award and Peabody Awardwinning series “Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry” on HBO. Her most recent directorial work, Between the World and Me aired as a special event on HBO and HBO Max in November 2020 to critical acclaim.

This Root 100 award winner and Sundance Fellow’s most recent projects include directing the world premiere, tour and theatrical adaption of Ta-Nehisi’ Coates’ New York Times best-selling novel Between the World and Me. In addition to her work at the Apollo Theater, Kamilah is set to direct the Broadway premiere of Soul Train alongside Questlove, Dominique Morrisseau, and Camille A. Brown.

Niegel Smith is a Bessie Award winning theater director and performance artist. He is the Artistic Director of NYC’s Obie Award winning theater, The Flea guiding the organzation through its refounding as a hub for exmerimental art by Black, brown and queer artists. He is also a board member of A.R.T./New York and was a ringleader of Willing Participant, an artistic activist organization that whips up urgent poetic responses to crazy shit that happens.

Smith has received residencies, grants and fellowships from Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Stage and Film,

Sundance Theatre Lab, Theater

Communications Group, Tucker Foundation, Van Lier Fund and VoxFest.

His current directing projects include The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, a multi-media opera and community ritual commissioned and produced by Hopkins Center for the Arts, SuzanLori Park’s Plays for The Plague Year produced by The Public Theater and Taylor Mac and Matt Rays The Bark of Millions produced by Pomegranate Arts and Nature’s Darlings. His theater work has been produced at The Alley Theater, The Barbican, Classical Theatre of Harlem, The Flea, The Goodman Theatre, HERE Arts Center, Hip Hop Theatre Festival, The Invisible Dog, Luna Stage, The Melbourne Festival, Magic Theatre, Mixed Blood, the National Black Theatre, New York Fringe Festival, New York Live Arts, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, Playwrights Horizons, Pomegranate Arts, The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Summer Play Festival, and Under the Radar, and his participatory walks and performances have been produced by Abrons Arts Center, American Realness, The Brooklyn Museum, Dartmouth College, Elastic City, The Flea, The Invisible niegelsmith.com

Dog, Jack, The New Museum, Prelude Festival, PS 122, the Van Alen Institute and Visual AIDS. He often collaborates with playwright/ performer Taylor Mac.

Niegel recently directed the wildly popular and critically-acclaimed jazz opera The Hang. For this work, he was nominated for a Drama League Award in best direction. Smith is co-director of the critically acclaimed ‘A 24-Decade History of Popular Music’, winner of the Kennedy Prize in Drama, Bessie Award, the Edwin Booth Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He associate directed the Tony Award winning musical FELA! – restaging that production in London, Lagos and its world tour, and he assistant directed the original Broadway and off-Broadway productions of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change. He has worked on the artistic staffs of The Public Theater, Trinity Repertory Company and Providence Black Rep.

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Smith attended high school in Detroit, and he grew up in the North Carolina piedmont, fishing with his dad, shopping with his mom and inventing tall-tale fantasies with his two younger brothers.