Black History Month Virtual Screening 2024

When we can’t see all, what we do see we see anew. Here, 70 women weave together a choreographic thread from Bebe Miller.

America, God Bless You (If It’s Good to You) highlights brief containers of memories from black women with diverse backgrounds. It examines their collective response to America’s inability to address and rectify the structures that create isolation in the community and its fragmented truths. The Dancer in the Black Dress calls for black women to collectively break these systems of oppression by utilizing their strengths and joining forces, echoing the message “The future is ours if you can count.”

Adumu is the story of the struggle of an African choreographer to achieve his dream of fusing his contemporary dance with Maasai traditional dance in performance in Nairobi. The Maasai are happy to oblige but Kenyan society and Covid put obstacles in his way.

This video leans on the recent recomposition of a Danish medieval ballad fragment “Raven Leads Runes.” The Nordic Raven symbol is an expression of land connectedness and part of a transcultural field of Raven totemism in order to renew modes of community that are less destructive to the world. In Raven I explore my own understanding of this symbol, I strive to give it form and narrate it through movement. Trying to create transcultural bounds through shared symbols like the Raven can be a way of building communities. For me it’s about going back to what I know from my native Central African culture but that I have grown up away from. In order to interpret the figure of the Raven in the Nordic symbolism, I deliberately chose a Wax fabric, a typically African cultural feature, that illustrates nature to establish a transcultural connection, thus emphasizing the fundamental power of Nature. The choreography, which is built both around grounding and upward impulse aims at placing the body firmly rooted into the earth, while reaching for new horizons.

This high energy piece features a fusion of Afro dance, House and Hip-Hop dance styles. Through an exploration of these dance forms, this piece seeks to establish American street dance as a direct extension of West African culture.

Inspired by the work of Ida Bell Wells, whose writing documented the episodic period of lynching’s in the 1890’s, What’s Bred in the Blood and Bone is a study of space and place, girded by the collective experiences of brown bodies. “Blood” explores “blood memory” as body memory and the ways in which our collective experiences bind and fortify us as African Americans.

Why are our fantasies so far removed from our reality? Regret to inform You follows a difficult day in the life of a Performer on the verge of forced obscurity and retirement. After one too many rejections, he becomes undone, retreating into a black and white dance fantasy to combat the reality of a society that has no place for him.