School for the Movement of the Technicolor People
Los Angeles 2015, Houston & Austin 2016, Toronto 2019)
Each exhibition installation serves as a groundwork for the school’s curriculum — its interactive learning objects, interventions, images and tactile architectures; as the space for free public classes; and as the stage for the company’s performances. The various components of the exhibition offer the visual and material aspects of the School’s curriculum to visitors when classes were not in session. Fully functioning as dance school, with its curriculum structured around the question, “What is a Black dance curriculum today?”, the School offered free weekly dance classes, workshops, and micro-performances initiated and facilitated by the dance company WXPT, an experimental collective of queer people of color and allies, dancers and non-dancers. The exhibition, interactive objects, images, weekly actions, and engagements are intended as a template that became an accumulative structure for an exchange of ideas and movements.
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People was originally conceived as a project by taisha paggett, and the infrastructure of the iterations of the school were organized and developed as a collaboration with taisha paggett, Ashley Hunt, Kim Zumpfe, and WXPT. The collaborators involved in School have changed in each city it has taken place.
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 2015
Curated by Robert Crouch
WXPT Los Angeles: Joy Angela Anderson, Charmaine Bee, Heyward Bracey, Rebecca Bruno, Erin Christovale, Loren Fenton, Maria Maia, Kloii “Hummingbird” Hollis, Meena Murugesan, taisha paggett, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Kristianne Salcines, .Turay, Devika Wickremesinghe and Suné Woods.
Demonstration Scores
Los Angeles “Meadow” Performance
Texas School for the Movement of the Technicolor People
DiverseWorks, Houston and Fusebox Festival, Austin (2016)
Curated by Rachel Cook
WXPT Houston/Austin: Joy Angela Anderson, Celestina Billington, Brittani Broussard, Adam Castaneda, Caleb Fields, Rosine Kouamen, Eternal Lokumbe, Maria Maea, Norola Morgan, Meena Murugesan, Kenneth Owens, taisha paggett, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, and .Turay.
This installation served as a continuing space for WXPT to have a rehearsal studio and space for weekly classes, where the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People researched their ongoing questions and experiments within the context of Texas. Convened in the memory of an erased Black school in East Texas, WXPT built a curriculum responding to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds, seeking new relationships, possibilities, freedoms and sovereign spaces. Through embodied practices that included performances, workshops, and conversations, curriculum activities included wanderings, gatherings, dispersions, the lifting of people, the staging of images and materials. Scores were developed that were taken out into different communities throughout Houston.
Houston Performances
Austin School for the Movement of the Technicolor People
Austin Classes
Toronto School for the Movement of the Technicolor People
Gallery TPW, Toronto (2019)
Curated by Kim Simon
WXPT Toronto includes: Hayward Bracey, Rodney Diverlus, Aisha Sasha John, Danielle Smith, Bishara Emm, taisha paggett, Ashley Colours Perez, and Ella Cooper
Toronto Performance & Classes
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is made possible by The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional funds came from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Programming was sponsored by a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Development support was given through Show Box L.A.’s Los Angeles Dance & Research Residency Program, which is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In Houston and Austin, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Diverseworks in partnership with Fusebox and NPN. The creation fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The presentation at DiverseWorks was made possible through support from the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
***This is an multifaceted project. I have primarily highlighted my own contributions to building the spaces and spatial engagements with materials that came out of a working in conversation with the many contributors and supporters during The School’s development, but there is a much wider scope of the project. please please please visit
The School for the Movement Website
Kim Zumpfe 