mayfield brooks Residency

Death is one of the most powerful life-giving forces in the universe. When a dead whale sinks to the bottom of the ocean, its body feeds an entire ecosystem, from the largest apex predators to the smallest microorganisms. Since 2021, choreographer mayfield brooks, the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence, has explored the life and death cycle of whales, and through their project Whale Fall extended this research into their embodied practice of vocal and dance improvisation. From the metaphor of the whale fall their project has expanded to explore musicality of whale song and the history of the whaling industry (one of the first integrated industries drawing heavily on Black and indigenous labor). At its core, Whale Fall asks the question: what becomes possible, inevitable, and necessary when systems break down?

With Whale Fall, a performance cycle in three parts, decomposition is a world-making force, a process of unbecoming that feeds a different existence. Throughout the 2025–2026 academic year, brooks will work closely with Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts to expand the Whale Fall project. During their residency, brooks will develop a new dance-film, an artist book, a series of community gatherings, and teach a class on practice-based research in the Dance Department. In partnership with Jacob’s Pillow, they will be provided with a 10-day rehearsal residency to begin developing a new work that looks to the shoreline as another way of mapping the entanglements of human and non-human worlds. In February 2026, brooks and their collaborators will present all three parts of the Whale Fall cycle at the Center for the Arts, using both the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and the CFA Theater, marking the first time this project is on view in its entirety.

Working in partnership with students and faculty, brooks’ residency will also provide an opportunity to gather its own local pod of thinkers and makers at Wesleyan from the arts, humanities, and sciences. Together they will consider what the death and life cycle of whales, as well as their communal adaptation to catastrophic environmental changes, might offer humans in navigating a similar environmental crisis. They will explore embodied ways of knowing our entangled relationship with the waterways that connect the world. Using brooks’ residency as an opportunity to connect across disciplines, this pod will participate in the work of undoing, or decomposing, the silos of the campus to imagine what else might be possible in our work together.

A full schedule of residency events will be shared in the summer of 2025. Student, faculty, staff, and community members interested in learning more about brooks’ residency are welcome to reach out directly to Joshua Lubin-Levy at jlubinlevy@wesleyan.edu.

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film Whale Fall, and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-2023 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and are currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.

View past events as part of this residency. 

Image: mayfield brooks, "Sensoria: An Opera Strange," June 2022, Danspace Project. Photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy of Danspace Project.