mayfield brooks

During their Pillow Lab residency, choreographer mayfield brooks will focus on the development of dArK oXyGen, a sonic dance exploring choreographies of breath and the recent discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean without sunlight or photosynthesis. This project is inspired by the spiritual connection between brooks’ experience as a child singer of Black gospel music, their daily practice of communing with the ocean in Rockaway Beach, New York where they live, and their movement practice exploring dances moved by breath, water, memory, and song. dArK oXyGen plays with the possibility that entering darkness is a generative process. It is an exorcism of the machines that mine our minds, disconnecting us from the depths of our own psyches, and how that disconnection might be linked to the machines that mine our deep sea ecosystems.

dArK oXyGen emerges from brooks’ ongoing ecological and ancestral research, which also informs their multi-year project Whale Fall. While distinct works, both pieces draw from overlapping lines of inquiry into decomposition, survival, deep sea zones, and the entanglements of human and non-human worlds. Whale Fall—a performance cycle in three parts examines the life and death cycle of whales and considers what becomes possible when systems break down. The term whale fall describes the process of a whale carcass as it falls to the ocean floor and how it provides a sudden, concentrated food source for organisms in the deep sea. In February 2026, brooks and collaborators will present an exhibition showcasing the newly commissioned video installation Whale Fall With Me at Wesleyan’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery in conjunction with a work-in-progress production of dArK oXyGen at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts Theater.

This Pillow Lab residency is co-sponsored by Wesleyan University and is part of brooks’ 2025–26 appointment as Artist in Residence at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts. Additionally, brooks has been working on a poetry chapbook and a compilation of their Whale Fall zines while teaching a practice-based research class in the Dance Department and initiating community gatherings centering on ocean themes. Their Pillow time will support the early development of dArK oXyGen as a key component of this broader research trajectory.

mayfield brooks 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. They teach and perform through Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology engaging dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks has received the Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Bessie Award nomination, and served as the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA. They are currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.