Cornerstone Performance | Hyde Park Art Center | October 9, 2025
A live performance within the Cornerstone exhibition in collaboration with choreographer/dancer Neila Ebanks, featuring performer/dancer Shavaughn Byndloss (both Jamaican) and drumming by Sherwin Ovid. The program was supported by funding from the Terra Foundation and was a featured program for the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2025. Video documentation by Josh Bulman, and photography by Beto de Freitas.
This live performance, created in collaboration with Jamaican choreographer Neila Ebanks and performed by Shavaughn Byndloss, extended the exhibition’s themes through movement, sound, and sculptural form. The performance considered how we interact with land and architectural environments—how memory, history, and systems of access shape those spaces.
Sculptural forms made specifically for the performance, along with elements of the installation, were activated by Byndloss—leaned on, circled, gathered, sounded, and repositioned—creating a shifting conversation between the body and built form. The movement draws from traditional and contemporary Jamaican dance vocabularies, reflecting Ebanks’ and Byndloss’s deep engagement with the cultural and political histories embedded in movement. A layered soundscape of Spiro’s field recordings from Jamaica (originally composed by Ralph Darden) and live drumming from Sherwin Ovid—talking drum—
About Neila Ebanks:
Neila Ebanks is a Jamaican choreographer, performer, and educator. She is co-founder of Enkompane and Director of Studies, Dance, at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Her work explores the intersections of movement, culture, and the social and political histories embedded in the body.
About Shavaughn Byndloss:
Shavaughn Byndloss is a Jamaican dancer, choreographer, and teacher. A senior member of L’Acadco and PLIÉ for the Arts, he has performed locally and internationally, receiving recognition including the Rex Nettleford Award and the Actor Boy Award for Outstanding Choreography. He recently made his choreographic debut with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (NDTC), premiering Home, a work exploring roots, identity, and belonging.
About Sherwin Ovid:
Ovid is a visual artist and drummer born in Trinidad who earned his Bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Lincoln Fellow in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he received his MFA. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago.