Skirball Salon: Theatre and Justice

(LA)HORDE leads the Ballet National through varied narration and redesigns the scope of a seamless dance, from the most structured to the most passionate performance. Over the course of the same evening, the dancers will present a range of performances, from the structured choreography of Lucinda Childs to the trailblazing style of Lasseindra Ninja, an icon in the queer ballroom community. In the (LA)HORDE universe, sensuality and diffracted virtual movement will come face to face with choreographic composition.

Peyvand (پیوند), the Persian word for Connectivity, features works related to this theme performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, including the world premiere of C Ce See by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, the first work in Cheswatyr Commissions, an initiative of Composers Now and the Cheswatyr Foundation. Nourbakhsh founded IFCA along with Anahita Abbasi and Aida Shirazi in 2017 as a platform to support, promote, and celebrate otherwise-unheard musical voices from the Iranian diaspora through concerts, public performances, installations, interdisciplinary collaborations, and workshops.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow.

About The Moth The Moth is an acclaimed nonprofit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. For 25 years, The Moth has presented over 50,000 stories, told live and without notes to standing­-room-only crowds worldwide. The Moth conducts eight ongoing programs: The Moth Mainstage, which tours internationally, has featured stories by Elizabeth Gilbert, Hasan Minhaj, Kathleen Turner, Malcolm Gladwell, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, John Turturro, Molly Ringwald, Boots Riley, Krista Tippett, Damon Young, Mike Birbiglia, Rosanne Cash, Danyel Smith and Tig Notaro, as well as an astronaut, a pickpocket, a hot­dog eating champion and hundreds more; The Moth StorySLAM program, which conducts open mic storytelling competitions in 28 cities: 26 in the US plus Melbourne, AU and London, UK; The Moth Community Program, which offers storytelling workshops and performance opportunities to adults who are too often overlooked by the mainstream media; The Moth Education Program, which brings the thrill of personal storytelling to high schools and colleges in New York, and educators around the world; The Moth Global Community Program, which develops and elevates true, personal stories from extraordinary individuals in the global south; The Moth Podcast—the 2020 Webby People’s Voice Award Winner for Best Podcast Series—which is downloaded 100 million times a year; MothWorks, which uses the essential elements of Moth storytelling as an empathetic communication tool; and the Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour which, produced by Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media and presented by PRX, The Public Radio Exchange, airs weekly on over 575 public radio stations nationwide. To date, The Moth has published four critically acclaimed books: The New York Times Best Seller The Moth: 50 True Stories (Hachette Books, September 2013), All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown (Crown Archetype, March 2017) — described as “wonderful” by NYT’s Michiko Kakutani and New York Times Best Sellers Occasional Magic: True Stories of Defying the Impossible (Crown Archetype, March 2019) and How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth (Crown Archetype, April 2022). The Moth has released its first card deck, A Game or Storytelling (Clarkson-Potter). The Moth’s second podcast, Grown, is out now on all major streaming platforms. Learn more at 

Kyle Abraham, Artistic Director of A.I.M, is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a 2015 City Center choreographer in residence and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. A.I.M (formerly Abraham In Motion) was born into hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and grounded in Abraham’s artistic upbringing in classical cello, piano, and the visual arts. Abraham’s work entwines a sensual and provocative vocabulary with a strong emphasis on sound, human behavior and all things visual.