AFTERWORDS: entanglement—Jonathan González and Darius Jones

Friday, April 24, 2026 at 6:00pm
Cross Street Dance Studio, 160 Cross Street, Middletown, Connecticut

Free and open to the public.

For the seventh event in the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series, choreographer, artist, and writer Jonathan González and Assistant Professor of Music Darius Jones explore the relation between dance and music as Black counterhegemonic practices: ways of mapping alternatives to the present.

In Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025), González theorizes Blackness as both a grammar occupying the interstices of white colonial culture and a means of expression that breaks down the hegemonic. Through a consideration of land, politics, magic, and movement, this hybrid text performs a perpetually unfinished task of resistance. In conversation with Jones, González will explore social movements, fragments, and memories that shape Black life—unpacking assemblages that disrupt historical and contemporary structures of power. Their dialogue will bridge their respective practices through movement, sonic, spiritual, and improvisatory inquiry.

Jonathan González is a choreographer, artist, and writer whose work moves between choreography, sound, image, writing, video, and collective practice. Their projects investigate how bodies engage architecture, memory, and culture, creating performances and installations that blur distinctions between movement, atmosphere, and form. González approaches choreography as a method of thinking—a way to explore how spatial, sonic, and social forces shape lived experience. Their recent works include Spectral Dances (American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2024), PRACTICE (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River To River Festival, 2025), perejil (Crystal Bridges/The Momentary, 2022), and Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025).

Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of Black music. Jones has been awarded the Van Lier Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Artist in Residence and commission, Western Front residence and commission, French-American Jazz Exchange Award, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation Award, and a Fromm Music Foundation commission from Harvard University. Jones is a member of the Roulette Intermedium Board of Directors, a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. Jones has collaborated with Henry Threadgill, Gerald Cleaver, Oliver Lake, Craig Taborn, Jason Moran, Dave Burrell, Eric Revis, Matthew Shipp, Marshall Allen, Nasheet Waits, Andre 3000, Meshell Ndegeocello, Cooper-Moore, Matana Roberts, Kris Davis, Shahzad Ismaily, Nicole Mitchell, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and many more. Jones has been featured in Pitchfork, The Wire, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and DownBeat, among others. Jones was the 2022 MATA Festival artist in residence and festival curator, where he premiered Colored School No. 3 (Extra Credit). Jones was featured on the cover of The Wire in April 2024 (#482), and Jones' fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s̶ suite but sacred) co-released on Northern Spy and We Jazz Records in 2023, was listed as #3 in The Wire's “Releases of the Year 1-50” and The Wire's #1 “Jazz & Improv,” and was also listed among NPR's top 50 albums of the year. In October 2024, Jones released Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) on AUM Fidelity.

“Entanglement” is a keyword for studying how human existence is bound up with the more-than-human world, and a call to imagine the web of relations that bind us to each other and the world across space and time. To recognize one’s entanglement complicates one’s sense of agency; to embrace one’s entanglement is to resist the notion of critical distance or objectivity. How do artists and curators navigate their own entanglements? How have they developed practices out of entanglement’s creative possibilities, and in the process transformed traditional ideas of authorship and agency? What work can art do to attune audiences to both the painful and pleasurable ways we are all entangled with each other and the worlds that exist around, before, and after us?

AFTERWORDS: entanglement is a series of public programs sponsored by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). Guest speakers include artists and curators reflecting on their own practice, process, or method while also attending to a shared keyword. All events are hybrid, featuring speakers both in-person and online.

Curated by CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06 and ICPP Director Noémie Solomon.

About ICPP
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance fosters the collective study of art and its histories with a focus on developing new critical methods for curating time-based art. Rather than narrowing in on a single authoritative definition of performance curation, ICPP’s aim has been to create a pluralistic conversation specifically around contemporary performance, providing fundamental tools with which artists and curators can develop their own approaches to the work. ICPP was created in 2011 by Sam Miller ’75, P’09 and Pamela Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16 at Wesleyan University.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome. We encourage you to RSVP to help us with our planning and to get a reminder the day before this event. While RSVPs are not required for entry, they are a big help! While you're on campus, feel free to talk with our gallery assistants about the exhibitions and other upcoming special programs, like our student-led tours.

RELATED EVENT

Ways To Move: Reading and Performance Workshop
Friday, April 24, 2026 from 1pm to 4pm
Cross Street Dance Studio, 160 Cross Street, Middletown, Connecticut

Choreographer and writer Jonathan González presents a three hour performance workshop based on his recently published book Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025).

Above (left): Portrait of Jonathan González by Rudy Gerson. Above (right): Darius Jones.