Artists Selected for New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab
31 March 2015- Port of Spain - New Waves! Institute is pleased to announce the artists selected for the Dancing While Black Performance Lab: Cynthia Oliver, Rashida Bumbray, Mzokuthulu Gasa, Melissa Alexis, Anika Marcelle, Jamie Philbert, Adanna Jones, Orlando Hunter, Nyama McCarthy-Brown, and The Black That I Am. The Performance Lab happens within New Waves! Institute, which celebrates its 5th edition from 22 July to 1 August 2015 at University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy for the Performing Arts in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Co-curated by New Waves! Director, Makeda Thomas and Paloma McGregor, Director of Dancing While Black, and produced through the New Waves! Commission Project, this experimental, multi-performance, interdisciplinary environment will feature dance and performances at the NALIS Amphitheatre in Port of Spain. The 10 selected guests will perform on Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 7pm. Free. For further information on the New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab, please call 321-1430 or email [email protected].
As a choreographer, Rashida Bumbray’s work combines vernacular and folkdance forms—jazz, blues, hoofing, and ring shouts—with magical realism and contemporary cultural and political directives to create intimate spaces of healing and transformation. Bumbray will offer "Run Mary Run”, which seeks to explore the connections between Shango Baptist traditions and rituals with Early Christian, Islamic, and African traditions that are the root of “American” Ring Shouts. The work was presented in 2012 at The Whitney Museum of America Art.
Cynthia Oliver, of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is a professor in the Dance Department at University of Illinois, Urbana and Artistic Director of COCo Dance Theatre. Oliver is building a new project and joins the performance lab to work with a group of men - local dancers and New Waves! participants - to "choreographically unearth ideas of manhood, those that are not merely mimetic external representations of form and style, but deeply rooted, nuanced understandings of the masculine".
Local choreographer, Anika Marcelle offers “#TroubleFree”, in her creative voice that is a mix of Afro-Caribbean styles (of Jamaica and Trinidad) and contemporary dance (UK) influences and tensions. The piece involves elements of dance and live vocal work. Jamie Philbert, born and “baptized in Trinidadian waters”, will offer “Petit Rivye”. The group work draws from Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones”, working through Haitian folk dance Yanvalou and modern dance movement.
Trinidadian dance scholar, Adanna Jones asks, What happens when a highly co-opted but also profoundly empowering bodily discourse becomes the basis of creating dance? Her work. “Choreographing the Caribbean Social Body”, aims to answer this query by investigating the performative limits of winin’ within the US Diaspora.
The artists of Braata Theatre Workshop's production of the Karl O’Brian Williams play “The Black That I Am,” deal with a black Caribbean immigrant’s exploration of gender, sexuality, and nationalism. How is memory and movement effective in ancestral emancipation? asks returning New Waves! participant Orlando Hunter in his work, Mutiny/When will you re-cog-nize. Through performance, the Brooklyn-based Hunter will research bodily “Emancipatory methodologies” which comes out of this New Waves! experience with Tony Hall’s “Jouvay Process”.
Nyama McCarthy-Brown's work, “Wanted”, has its heart in the mother and son relationship; and how that relationship is viewed in a society that filters its opinions of people through racial constructs. The title speaks to the dual/duel ways black men are wanted - by their families, and as a criminal object. Professor of Dance at Indiana University, McCarthy-Brown wonders how the dynamics of parenting a black male child shifts in the Caribbean space; where race and class intersect in particular ways that may inform a wider perspective of blackness and mothering.
At its core, the New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab is about how these performances can move with, move through, interact with, and engage with one another. Selected artists are invited to work during the course of New Waves! 2015, from 22 July to 1 August, with New Waves! faculty, guests, participants and the local community. The Institute offers 10 hours of studio lab space for each artist/company at the Academy for Performing Arts. In the spirit of the yard - where dance, drum, chants, speeches, conversations all happen, often simultaneously - the audience is invited to move through the performance, which offers several intimate and interconnected performances spaces within it. The program is co-curated by New Waves! Director, Makeda Thomas and Paloma McGregor, Director of Dancing While Black, and produced through the New Waves! Commission Project, which offers a presenting platform for dance artists in the Caribbean and throughout its diaspora.
The New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab will be presented on Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 7pm at NALIS Amphitheatre at Hart & Abercromby Streets, Port of Spain. The event is free. On Friday, 31 July 2015, all 12 presenting guest artists will participate in a post-performance discussion moderated by Institute Director, Makeda Thomas. 10am – 12pm. University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy for Performing Arts, Dance Studio, 3rd Fl. Open to the public. Free.
For further information on the New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab, email [email protected].
