SNOW

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This event will be held in English.

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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. He has received fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the University of East Anglia. His books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire and the literary nonfiction work 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, where he studied classical piano before moving to France to study engineering and philosophy. After discovering jazz, he trained at a Paris jazz school and developed a distinctive style blending jazz with African and other musical traditions. He has collaborated with renowned artists including Richard Bona, Alain Jean-Marie, André Manoukian, and Yerso, founded the African Jazz Quartet in 2011, and has performed extensively in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Côte d’Ivoire. In 2013, he served as musical director and arranger for La Grande Nuit Léo Ferré in Marseille, working alongside leading international performers.