Jul 24th 2025

Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 4th Floor North

Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop shares an excerpt from THICK: a crumbling freak show, a multimedia solo performance that ripples through the canon of works interrogating what it means for a Black woman’s livelihood to rest on the performance of her body.

Through movement, sound, projections, and spacemaking, Freeman evokes the work of Blondell Cummings—whose “moving pictures” gave choreographic shape to the intimacy of Black home life. In this offering, Freeman asks: What does the spatiotemporal history of Black women and our bodies reveal about consent, commodification, and spectacle?

Bio: Jenn Freeman is an interdisciplinary artist who creates on the homeland of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Freeman, also known as Po’Chop, weaves dance, storytelling, drag and striptease together to create experiences that illuminate Black queer life. She is a co-founder of House of the Lorde, a multi-functional space rooted in Black Feminist praxis, the co-producer of the adored Notes on Masculinity, a drag king centered cabaret and creator of The Black Burlesque Directory, an archive of Black burlesque performers across the world. Freeman has collaborated with Jamila Woods, Anna Martine Whitehead and VAM Studio. Her work has been supported by Foundation of Contemporary Art, DANCE/USA, Urban Bush Women, United States Artists and Chicago Dancemakers Forum.

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