SNOW

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered.

Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event.

This event will be held in English.

Jason Allen-Paisant presents SNOW, a work developed during his fellowship at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and the Imagination. Performed with José Pendje on piano.

SNOW is a philosophical performance-poem that sets questions of history, ecology, and animality into motion through rhythm, image and embodiment. At the heart of the performance is snow itself, physical and metaphysical, an engine through which the poem unfolds. Reworking the scale and ambition of the modernist epic for the present, SNOW fuses humour and satire with an unflinching exploration of systems of violence and the resurgence of fascism.

A detached yet urgent ‘spirit of history’ carries the poem through myth, buried histories and contemporary crisis, refusing to resolve them into argument. Holding its questions open, SNOW becomes a charged encounter whose rhythms reverberate beyond the performance, allowing thought to move through sensation and bodily memory.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a poet, scholar, and writer whose honors include the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is full professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. His books include Engagements with Aimé Césaire and The Possibility of Tenderness. He is an associate editor of the literary journal Callaloo.

José Pendje is a Franco-Congolese pianist and composer who grew up in Kinshasa and trained in France with a background in classical piano and jazz. He has collaborated with artists including Richard Bona and Alain Jean-Marie and founded the African Jazz Quartet.

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and renovated in 2023.