NIC Kay delivers an online free, public lecture as part of the Fall 2020 Intra-Disciplinary Seminar series. What is wellness and how can it be maintained whilst - living with, and despite white supremacy, anti-black racism, policing, and prisons? How do time and duration of trauma, sadness, and labor, shape Black people's bodies and choreograph their movements? For the last four years, Kay has utilized these questions and more to form the project, GET WELL SOON

[exercises in getting well soon] which is based on a loose and often used phrase indicating a

hope of recovery and a reckoning with the culturally abstracted terms wellness and hope.  The

[exercises in getting well soon] are a series of interdisciplinary performances with the aim to

practice, 'Hope as a discipline’. The exercises have been articulated as movement, installation, games, endurance, ritual, poetry, websites, and sound.



Registration is required.

NIC Kay is from the Bronx. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. Their work choreographically highlights and meditates on Black life in relationship to space, social structures, and architecture through centering embodied practices. Their works have been performed nationally and internationally in spaces including Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto; Encuentro 19, Mexico; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; and University of Arts, Zürich. They have exhibited work at the California College of the Arts; CCA Wattis Institute; Gallery 400, Chicago; and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago. They published their first book, Cotton Dreams, with Candor Arts in 2020.

The IDS public lecture series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation. The IDS public lecture series is also made possible by generous support from the Open Society Foundations.