This speaks to two previous links I included in the ICA Daily – Slow Hand Clutches on NTS Radio and the lecture ‘Internationale Blues’ by Robin D.G. Kelley. Extracts from this lecture are incorporated alongside Kelley’s ‘The Politics of Solidarity’ (May 2019) in this hour of music and recordings. Featuring Shabaka & The Ancestors, Andrew Hill, John Coltrane and Ahmed Abdul-Malik.

So blues stretches time, it’s flexible, it’s improvisatory, it’s simultaneously in the moment and in the past and it’s in the future. The timeless space of imagination is where the blues is situated. – Robin D.G. Kelley

I’ve been listening to Beatrice Dillon’s album Workaround which was released on PAN in February. Fill your weekend with her compositions – this mesmerising debut solo project draws on wide-ranging influences.

5 January – 12 February 1977. Lagos, Nigeria hosts the second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), attracting 15,000 participants – Black artists, writers, and performers – from around the world. As the official photographer of the North American delegation, Marilyn Nance documented the festival, creating an archive of more than 1,500 images of this historic celebration of Pan-African art and culture. In this conversation recorded at the ICI New York (January 2020), Marilyn Nance discusses her involvement in FESTAC with curator and scholar Oluremi Onabanjo, focusing on their collaboration for the forthcoming photobook Last Day in Lagos.

An open-access global theatre portal with over 3,800 articles and reviews covering theatre and performance in 90 countries, The Theatre Times’ second online theatre festival plays until 15 May with productions by Thomas Ostermeier, Katie Mitchell, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Heiner Goebbels and Milo Rau (among others). Michelle Memran’s The Rest I Make Up, that we presented at the ICA last year, plays in the festival’s Beyond the Stage section: the work focuses on the friendship between the Off-Broadway dramatist herself and director Maria Irene Fornes across ten years of filming together. This collaborative project poignantly considers memory, friendship and the profound connection between an artist and her work. Watch a live Q&A with Memran at 5pm (BST) today.

A couple of minutes of joy from dancer and choreographer Oona Doherty, whose London performances last year at Southbank Centre and The Yard as part of Dance Umbrella I found outstanding. It’s impossible to experience the blast of her live work right now, but her tracks The Blue Series can be enjoyed online, and let’s just have patience – she’s set for massive things.

Between Bridges, a non-profit exhibition space initially based in London from 2006 – 2011, based in Berlin since 2014, and founded by the Chair of the ICA Board Wolfgang Tillmans, launched 2020Solidarity this week, an initiative supporting independent venues, organisations and publications that are existentially threatened by the current crisis. Artists such as Isa Genzken, David Lindert, Heike Karin-Föll, Luc Tuymans, Elizabeth Peyton, Seth Price, Tomma Abts, Rachel Harrison and many more have designed A2 posters sold for €50 each through the websites of largely Berlin-based non-profits.