Visual artist Deville Cohen and choreographer Shamel Pitts have both engaged the idea of the “company” or “collective” as models for collaboration that dismantle hierarchy within the creative process. Cohen is the founder and artistic director of Hand to Mouth, a personal project and intimately bound dance company made up of “sentient and inanimate collaborators.” In an attempt to integrate Cohen’s studio and performance practices through a process of collaboration (remotely and in-person), Hand to Mouth conducted workshops with dancers, writers, and musicians in New York, Berlin, and Johannesburg during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dancers’ movements transform the sets and props in Cohen’s performances, serving as human operators of performative-kinetic-sculptures aiming to subvert the spatial syntaxes of both theatrical and sculptural spaces as well as the hierarchies they embody. Pitts, on the other hand, is the founder and artistic director of TRIBE, a Brooklyn-based arts collective creating, developing, and sharing multidisciplinary art projects that understand performance art and live art as practices of human connection and hold the afro-futuristic movement as their biggest inspiration.
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