Making waves: Exploring Caribbean dance...while Black

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

New Waves! 2015 Dancing While Black Performance Lab

What practices constitute Caribbean dance? In what ways has Caribbean dance been recognized and acknowledged - within and outside the geocultural region? Is there a Caribbean embodied archive? How does dance, as a field of study, define Caribbean diasporic movement?

New Waves! 2015 invites proposals from choreographers, dancers and performance artists to submit proposals for the DANCING WHILE BLACK PERFORMANCE LAB. Co-curated by New Waves! Director, Makeda Thomas and Paloma McGregor, Director of Dancing While Black, this experimental, multi-performance, interdisciplinary environment will feature dance and performances in the yard of and on stage at Port of Spain’s Big Black Box.

The New Waves! 2015 Dancing While Black Performance Lab is a manifestation of the New Waves! Commission Project, which has offered a presenting platform for dance artists in the Caribbean since 2012. We welcome proposals from dance and performance artists working in the Caribbean and those throughout its diaspora whose work is grounded in Caribbean aesthetics. In a riff off “Dance a yard before yuh dance abroad,” we will also explore how Caribbean dance artists create and perform work in the international landscape and how a new generation of cultural producers is transforming the ways the region is imagined and represented.

Performance themes could include:

Migration
The Body as Home
Spaces, Objects, The Body as containers of memory
Hybridity, Authenticity & Otherness
Water, land and spirit
What is Black? Proximity to Blackness
Identity and community making
Gender and sexuality
Colonialism, nationalism, citizenship and commodification
Caribbean dance and mediated technologies

Proposals should be no more than 2 pages, single spaced, 12 pt. font and include:

Statement of how your work connects with theme(s) for this year’s Performance Lab.

Explanation of how your practice has engaged with site and space, including ways you envision that practice living in a multi-performance setting during New Waves!

A link to a work sample - 5 minutes or less - that demonstrates your aesthetic leanings, with a 150-word or less statement about how the work is connected to your proposal.

Due Date for Proposals: February 20, 2015

Confirmations: February 27, 2015

Submit a proposal to: dancingwhileblack@gmail.com

Questions to: institute@makedathomas.org

Registration must be paid by May 15, 2015.

Additional details are available at http://makedathomas.org/institute.newwaves.

Since 2012, Dancing While Black has supported dialogue, documentation, process and performance for Black dance artists living and working in the U.S. context. What carries over, strips away, shifts, amplifies when the context for presenting these platforms is a place where Black culture is the dominant culture? For the NEW WAVES! 2015 DANCING WHILE BLACK PERFORMANCE LAB, DWB founder, Caribbean-born Paloma McGregor, is interested in the way context plays a role in cultural production among people of color whose aesthetics are connected to Caribbean identity. Selected participants will be asked to submit a brief statement after the experience that helps to illuminate the myriad experiences that will emerge. These statements will be considered for publication in the forthcoming journal Dancing While Black: In Our Own Words.

Let’s Dance!