mayfield brooks (they/them) 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.
www.improvisingwhileblack.com/
*mayfield’s choreographic approach, Improvising while Black or IWB, developed after mayfield began to write about their personal experience of being racially profiled as they were Driving while Black or DWB in San Francisco, California. IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project that lives in the question of Blackness, and explores vocal and dance improvisation, (de)composition, breath choreographies, and pedagogies of embodied liberation. Like an ecology, IWB is continually evolving and moving.