2020 - PRESENT

EPISODE #1 AVAILABLE FOR TOURING

Anticipated Premiere: 2022/2023

The Conversation Series is an original, intermedia project where two male co-conspirators, one queer Black body, one heteronormative White body commit to unrestricted sociality centering on a collective laboring toward personal, political, and environmental (un)doing and (re)constructing.

Unfolding as a series of episodes, The Conversation Series will be an exhaustive collision course of in-between states that Wilkins is developing and performing collaboratively with Avery Ryder Turner. Unaccepting of straightforward solutions, they seek exposure to dissonances and human complexity to find home where the paths to a less blemished future can begin. They have already gathered and interacted at informal sites, wheat fields, spillway infrastructures, and baseball dugouts on indigenous territories of Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute Nations. These spaces and the ones yet to be determined are chosen to access and generate intellectual, somatic, emotional, and intuitive knowledge, consequently decentralizing institutional knowledge. This evening-length work will meld together live performance, dance, music, design, film, and technology.

Wilkins embraces his Southern heritage as rich resources for defining an “American” identity shaped by hybridity, resilience, and co-existence.  He rejects notions of hierarchy by preferencing the value of bodies coexisting –sharing weight, responsibility, and performance become the means for moments of recognition and transformation. The Conversation Series, matched with the collective commitment of Wilkins and Turner to each other, embodies the response that Wilkins believes is necessary for manifesting a more socially just America.

The Conversation Series is a byproduct of Multiscapes and emerges out of a creative process that spanned nearly two years.

​

​

COLLABORATION TEAM

​

Concept & Direction Helanius J. Wilkins

Choreography Helanius J. Wilkins in collaboration with Avery Ryder Turner

Cinematography & Original Sound Score Composition & Performance Watcheye Studios  l  Carlos Flores

Additional Collaborators to be announced. 

​

​

Looking for: Presenting Partners, Funders, Touring Opportunities