support the creation of Voncena's Spell

Hello. Welcome. Thank you for finding your way to this gofundme page.

We are so glad you are here.

WHO WE ARE

We are a collaborative team of 9+ mostly bipoc & queer artists and community organizers working collectively to raise $12,000 to bring a new work of live performance, Voncena's Spell, to life. Your gift directly supports artist labor, materials, and production costs for our June 2026 world premiere at Abrons Arts Center in New York City.

We approach performance as a vessel for social dialogue, spiritual reflection, and collective healing, utilizing multidisciplinary practices to center marginalized voices and untold stories.

WHAT WE ARE RAISING FUNDS FOR

We're launching this campaign to support the incredible collaborative team committed to the radical, urgent, and necessary work of re-imagining and world-building.

This work is a physical, emotional, spiritual labor of radical creation, that reverberates through queer and bipoc+ communities. Your donation directly supports this labor and the labor of a nexus of practitioners surrounding this community. A community that is historically and currently under-resourced and under attack.

Your contribution directly impacts how we bring this work to life— allowing us to provide fair compensation for artists and collaborators, make costume and set materials, invest in the technical elements of the show, provide rehearsal space, and related resources to realize the creative vision of Voncena's Spell.

ABOUT VONCENA'S SPELL

Voncena’s Spell is a live artwork exploring the intersection of memory, memorial, and the speculative futures of post-mortal radical Black life. Part auto-fiction, part space maroon odyssey, the work uses embodied queer archival strategies to journey into the complex layers of Black existence, ecological grief, and blood memory. Set aboard the spacecraft Voncena, an alternative bio-intelligence—named after and embodying jaamil olawale kosoko’s deceased mother—awakens. Experiencing the ontological delay of a new anti-verse surrounding them, this genre-bending performance combines live feed media, choreography, and embodied poetics to immerse the audience in a complex physical narrative where personal and collective histories merge. Voncena's Spell represents the awakening of silenced histories portaling within a vessel toward a Black future beyond capture.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

1. Every gift helps manifest the vision! No amount is too small (or too big). Really.

2. Share this request for support with your community.

some ways to give

$5,000 - conjurors

Conjuror’s are co-commissioners of Voncena’s Spell. As a co-commissioner of Voncena’s Spell you will receive the following:

$2,500 - res(is)ters

Res(is)ters gift critical time and space to kps to deepen our reservoir of dreaming as a creative tool for the radical world-building necessary to make Voncena’s Spell a reality.

As a res(is)ter you will receive the following:

$1,000 - crafters

Crafters are creative partners particularly attuned to the abundant futures we are creating.

You will receive:

$500 - transgressors

Transgressors understand the urgency of making radical live art and the precarity of doing so.

Donors at this level receive:

All previous tier rewards

$250 - visioners

Visioners have the foresight to realize the power of their collective impact.

Visioners receive:

$100 - dreamers

Dreamers believe in the power of live art and the magic of gathering in a room together—in artmaking, in ceremony, and in an invocation of new ways of being together.

Dreamers receive:

$50 - lovers

Lovers make our hearts sing! Lovers have our deep gratitude and thanks.

Lovers receive:

$25 - wayfinders

Wayfinders light the path for others to find us.

You’ll receive:

$15 - community-builder

Community-builders are the underpinnings of our world.

You’ll receive:

If you are moved to support radical, experimental, genre-defying live performance created by queer, BIPOC artists, click Donate and share this page with your community to help us bring Voncena’s Spell to life.

Thank you for being part of this journey, and for believing in the power of live art to illuminate, heal, and transform. Whether you are able to give $5 or $5,000, you are helping us bring this work to life.

–jaamil, song, maij, and the kps technical and administrative team

MORE ABOUT US

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, educator, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent, originally from Detroit, MI. Their conceptual and emergent practice fluidly moves across live performance, video, sculpture, and poetry integrating ritual, spiritual inquiry, and embodied poetics. Through Black critical studies and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures radical strategies for freedom, healing, and care, offering an expansive vision of artistic and social transformation.

kosoko’s interdisciplinary work explores emergent Black queer theory, critical rest-care strategies, and the politics of visibility and fugitivity. Their projects—ranging from multimedia installations to performative lectures—bridge experimental art with community-driven engagement. Learn more on their website.

Song Aziza Tucker is a project-based movement and writing artist whose works have spiraled out of her love for black women, music, and poetry. Her latest work “After the Flood”, honors the inspirations of many black femme creators she holds close. Placing herself alongside these artists reminds her that dance is not only an expansive and visceral experience, but an intimate and integral way of communication for historically and systemically hushed bodies. Song is deeply moved by folks who bring their voluminous selves to the forefront, allowing creative collaborators to be seen with open and soft eyes.

Maij Aladesuyi is a cellist, DJ, tarot reader, and sommelier. He began playing classical cello at age ten and studied music at Indiana University Bloomington under the tutelage of the famed Sharon Robinson. As a DJ, he performs house music in various clubs, bars, hotels, fundraisers, and parties throughout New York City under the moniker 'Black Maij.' Maij is also an astrologer and tarot reader, offering personalized readings that combine his deep understanding of cosmic forces with his intuitive insights.

Jordan McCree is an artist based in Philadelphia. Their most recent collaborations include: we come to collect: a flirtation with capitalism(jenn kidwell and the blackening), The Comeuppance(Woolly Mammoth/Wilma Theater), Good Person of Setzuan(Wilma Theater), Grief Hotel(Clubbed Thumb), Cost of Living(Philadelphia Theatre Company), The BFG(Arden Theater), The World Takes(short film, Eight Flow Studio), Eternal Life Part 1(The Wilma Theater), The Karamazovs(film, Village Park Productions), Fat Ham(2021 World Premiere, The Wilma Theater). They were one of the 2022 grant recipients to the 1/52 Project. They are also a member of Philly-based, Barrymore Award winning, hip hop collective, ILL DOOTS. Their mixtapes, The Sample Pack Experiment, is available everywhere!

RED is a trans theater maker, performer, designer, and enthusiastic gender-deviant. RED's work examines trans narratives and experiences, not only through the lens of the human experience, but through the queering of objects and virtual space.

Clareese Hill is a practice-based art researcher in XR and Immersive Media and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. She explores the validity of the word “identity” through her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman and her societal role projected on her to perform as a Black feminist academic

Marisa Conroy is a New Jersey-based multidisciplinary artist. They work within the delicious messiness of the post-digital, creating work that deals with the uneasy entanglements of the human and the digital. They take invisible digital processes and make them live and embodied on stage. Their work combines video, haunting sound design, and live audio mixing filtered through the human body. Their work is radically queer and unexpectedly scientific.

LD DeArmon works in performance as stage manager, production manager, and lighting designer. DeArmon has worked on projects for Ayano Elson, Yvonne Meier, Yvonne Rainer, Ephrat Asherie, Walter Dundervill, Daria Fain, and Larissa Velez-Jackson and has had the honor of working on the following Bessie awarded productions: David Thomson’s he his own mythical beast; a canary torsi/Yanira Castro’s Last Audience and Tess Dworman’s a child retires. They currently reside in Richmond, VA, and are a member of TRUX; a DIY collective focused on re-engineering our human components into a collaboratively designed machine that generates power without harm.

and the KPS administrative team