Meet Gabri Christa's "Magdalena" at Theaterlab

Gabri Christa in her new multimedia solo, Magdalena
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Having spent the early afternoon at 92Y Harkness visiting Pino-Latino's intersection of Asian and Latinx cultures, I headed to Midtown West for Gabri Christa's multimedia solo, Magdalena. I found the Curaçao-born dance artist/filmmaker greeting people arriving at Orietta Crispino's tiny studio at Theaterlab, carefully guarding a square of white performance space surrounded on three sides by a string of light bulbs from heedless, bull-in-china-shop audience members.

Towards the rear of the demarcated space, a baby doll of fragile, chocolate-brown porcelain sat atop an ancient valise. At the start of her hour-long performance, Christa, a woman of mixed races and cultures, began her storytelling by pointing to the Black doll and relaying its history. (How did this toy, so rare in the Europe of her Dutch mother Magdalena's youth, come into her family? From an auntie who'd gotten it as a present from her Black, and married, lover.) As in the best stories, that single point and gaze would steadily open up many vibrant channels of memory, history, questions, feelings. We would be introduced to a family, to a war, to Catholic schooling, to interracial love, to the Black Caribbean, to adventurous vitality and, finally, to aging and dementia. For this is a story moving towards her mother's state of forgetting, and it is an act of loving discovery, recall and reclamation.

A gifted storyteller, Christa employs many supportive tools--among them, a treasure trove of archival visual imagery, some of it from personal family materials. But none of that would matter if the interconnected tales themselves--as in Bennyroyce Royon's new piece for Ballet Hispánico--did not rest on a foundation of humanity.

Conception, writing and performance: Gabri Christa
Direction: Erwin Maas
Design and Dramaturgy: Guy de Lancey
Radio play performed by Wayne Miller and the Spotlight Theater
Music: Izaline Callister and Vernon Reid

Magdalena continues through Saturday, September 22, but hurry. Seating is extremely limited. For information and tickets, click here.

Theaterlab
Third Floor
357 West 36th Street (west of 8th Avenue)
(map/directions)

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Wilson Harris, 96

Wilson Harris, Guyanese Writer of Intricate Novels, Dies at 96
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 16, 2018

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Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE moves to value and protect culture

Left to right: Sita Frederic, Michael Manswell, Candace Thompson,
Jessica Phoenix and Valierie McLeod-Katz
(photo: Adanna Jones)

As you can imagine, there are so many exciting and important events in New York, and beyond, that I cannot get to, and--as a woman of Caribbean heritage--I'm grateful to Candace Thompson for putting me in touch with Adanna Kai Jones, today's guest contributor, who offers following report on Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE's May 4th gathering at Brooklyn College.

Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE 

Takes a Stance Against Cultural Appropriation

by guest contributor Adanna Kai Jones


On Thursday, May 4, a relatively quiet evening, some fyah-starters gathered in the Woody Tanger Auditorium of the Brooklyn College Library to hold the first ever Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE (DCC) town hall meeting on cultural appropriation. Walking into the auditorium, people quickly noticed “graffiti” on the walls, to use the lingo of DCC’s town hall moderator Sita Frederick. Large sheets of white paper, taped to the walls, bore questions that all participants were invited to contemplate and to respond to in writing:

1. Do you think about the creators of your favourite Caribbean music? What ways have you tried to support them (financially and otherwise)?

2. Who do you think should be able to teach Caribbean dance styles? What should the requirements be?

3. What does mastery look like? What qualities or skills make one a Master teacher?

4. Do you enjoy seeing Caribbean dance/music on the mainstream?  Why? Why not?

5. What do you think is the responsibility of mainstream artists when using our culture?

Given this already-rich food for thought, participants were next offered a taste of Caribbean creativity--a mini-class on Jamaican dancehall taught by the dynamic duo of Kendell “History” Hinds and Korie Genius (a.k.a. Genius), two members of the Black Gold Dance Crew. We learned old school dancehall dances such as the Willie Bounce, the Wacky Dip, the Gas and the Mad Run. After we practiced these steps for a bit, the teachers changed to a follow-along method, the way dances were taught and learned in the dancehalls of Jamaica. Similar to a call-and-response format, first History and Genius would execute a four-count movement, then we would be expected to repeat their steps. Although these steps were tricky, we caught the flows, styles and energies of our instructors. In effect, “responding” to their “call” got easier and easier as the class continued.

Kendell "History" Hinds and Korie Genius (a.k.a Genius)
teaching the Willie Bounce
(photo: Adanna Jones)

Following the class, five people took to the stage and the main discussion began. The panel featured dance masters Michael Manswell (Creative Director of the Something Positive dance troupe) and Valerie McLeod-Katz (Artistic Director and Coordinator of the Visual and Performing Arts Programs at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School) plus the up-and-coming game-changers Candace Thompson (Artistic Director of ContempoCaribe and Founding Executive Director of DCC) and Jessica Phoenix (founder of FIYAH Dancehall Theater). And, as aforementioned, Sita Frederick (Director of Community Engagement Programs for Lincoln Center Education) moderated the panel discussion.

Frederick started things off by posing a question to everyone in the room: “What does cultural appropriation look like?” After calling attention to Drake’s obsession with Jamaican dancehall and to Beyoncé’s invocation of Oshun, she then shifted the conversation to a discussion of how we should take on such forms of appropriations, which have become rather commonplace in today’s society.

Over the next hour, panelists discussed their training, mentors and inspirations, calling the legacies of Eugene Joseph, Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham into the space. These are the great shoulders upon which today’s Caribbean dance makers stand.

Talking about how and why each panelist began teaching and promoting Caribbean dance and culture, everyone recalled recognizing the need–really, a demand--for their teaching as well as the need to build community. They have all created a space where cultural history is kept alive, valued and passed on for many generations that will follow.

Thereafter, Frederick opened the floor for questions and open discussion. The first audience member to speak called attention to the nuances of the term “natural,” specifically citing the exploitation of Caribbean cultural labor by people who claim a “natural” affinity for all things Caribbean. (Her line of questioning further brought to mind Rachel Dolezal’s infamous appropriation of Black identity.) In response, panelists and members of the audience prescribed the following remedies:

1. As a Caribbean community, we need to put money and value back into our own arts, culture and heritage.

2. We must institutionalize our cultural practices so that the state has no choice but to support us, especially through large grants.

3. We must make sure that our team is filled with people knowledgeable about all aspects of society--especially experts in law and policy, accounting and finance, marketing and social media, in addition to cultural masters, writers and creators.

4. We must be honest, be of integrity and hold everyone, especially ourselves, accountable.

As the first DCC town hall meeting ended, it was very clear that everyone still had much more to say. Most of the audience members and panelists lingered, getting into deeper discussions of many of the points raised.

In general, we need this type of gathering in New York City, period. In today’s fast-paced world of Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, there is too much at stake for us to not take more control over how Caribbean dance cultural practices are transmitted and used.

As a Trinidad-born, US-raised, winer woman, I look forward to the next town hall meeting where we can clarify our agenda, further our vision and expand our audience. In conclusion, with DCC taking the lead in creating space for Caribbean dancemakers to take a stance against cultural (mis-)appropriation, I expect that the Caribbean dance community will continue to work together and forge a path for profound social change, not only throughout New York but also throughout the world.

Adanna Kai Jones
(photo courtesy of Adanna Kai Jones)

Adanna Kai Jones received her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and her BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts—Rutgers University. She has performed in professional dance companies based in NYC, including the Julia Ritter Performance Group and Souloworks with Andrea E. Woods. And in general, her research remains focused on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus to the rolling hip dance known as winin’. With regards to her own creative pursuits, she has choreographed dance-theater pieces that were not only based on her research, but were also used as tools for generating more research questions. In July 2015, she choreographed Wine & Tales in Port of Spain, Trinidad, which was presented by New Waves! 2015 and the Dancing While Black Performance Lab. And in May 2016, she performed Rum & Coke in New York City at Field Studies 2016. Both performances were rooted in her ethnographic fieldwork on the wine and Caribbean Carnivals within the US. As a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, she taught a survey class on folkloric and popular Afro-Caribbean dances, as well as a composition dance class that used Caribbean aesthetics along side that of US contemporary dance practices. Currently, she is an adjunct at both Marymount Manhattan College and Temple University, teaching two lecture courses on dance and culture.


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Derek Walcott, 87

Derek Walcott, Poet and Nobel Laureate of the Caribbean, Dies at 87
by William Grimes, The New York Times, March 17, 2017

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E. R. Braithwaite,104

E. R. Braithwaite, Author of ‘To Sir, With Love,’ Dies at 104

by Sewell Chan, The New York Times, December 13, 2016

Candace Thompson: Caribbean dance artists step forward

Dancer-choreographer Candace Thompson
performs her solo, Of Circles and Bright Colours,
in New Traditions: A Showcase for Caribbean Choreographers
(photos: Kearra Gopee)

Questions for 
Candace Thompson

Dance artist and Executive Director
Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE

EYA: How did your Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE come about?

CT: There were choreographers whose work I wanted to see more of, and when I started making my own work, I realized that it was difficult to find places to perform it. One day, I called a friend who's also Caribbean, and we got to talking, and he said, "Oh, I was having the same idea!" We had a meeting, right then and there, outlining a bunch of things that we were interested in making happen. That was the beginning, last December.

EYA: What kind of visibility would you like to see for Caribbean dance artists?

CT: Contemporary dance isn't necessarily interwoven into our Caribbean culture. It's hard to connect with audience members who might possibly appreciate the work. We are interested in taking our work to the community, to people who share our background and heritage, getting them to know about us and invest in us creating work.

EYA: Do you feel that there's a kind of stereotype or a box that Caribbean artists are put into?

CT: To a certain extent. Because a lot of Caribbean work--and this, of course, is a generalization--infuses a lot of concepts and ideas from our culture, folkloric culture, movement and vocabulary, with contemporary dance, it's just hard to put that next to traditional modern dance or contemporary downtown dance. It's hard for people to see them in the same way. It becomes hard to put that on stage in venues that are widely known for producing modern or contemporary work. It gets written off as fusion or whatever term people use when they don't know how to categorize something.

For me, it's still contemporary dance. It's just coming from where I come from, from my background, my nationality. It's like when Urban Bush Women or other companies do work that is part of the diaspora. For some reason it gets separated from contemporary dance because it has this diasporic angle.

Caribbean artists, to a large extent--and, again, I am generalizing--see identity as being a large part of how we think about ourselves. So, a lot of times, work becomes about identity, but Caribbean artists make other kinds of work, too. It gets tricky when people can't see past [identity]. Why can't that work be alongside any other work?

EYA: So far, who's involved and how are they working within the COLLECTIVE?

CT: We had our first meeting in April and decided that we would do a show. I asked people I knew to submit work for the show in June--"New Traditions: A Showcase for Caribbean Choreographers"--at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. We had works by Beatrice Capote, Shola K. Roberts, Maxine Montilus, Alicia C. Dellimore, Davalois Fearon, Adia Whitaker and myself, and it went really well. People gave of their time.

After the show, we met again to begin to solidify the structure, form a community board where people would have positions for a year and, at the end of the year, we might see who would want to serve in a new role or who else would want to volunteer their time.

Right now, I'm the Executive Director. Maxine Montilus and Marguerite Hemmings are co-directors. There are also people doing marketing, research and the like, although those positions have not yet been solidified.

About Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE

Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE is a representative body that facilitates and promotes Caribbean Dance, Caribbean Dancers and those that present and practice Caribbean dance forms and/or deal with Caribbean content.

The COLLECTIVE aims to:

* Create a platform for Contemporary Caribbean Dance Practitioners, Dancers, Choreographers, Dance Scholars to network, communicate and share resources

* Representative body for Caribbean Diasporic Dance in the NYC Area community

*Create an information hub listing classes, events, performances, teaching opportunities and other resources for Caribbean artists and dancers in the NYC

* Share information on events happening within the Diaspora worldwide

* Support the creation of new works by Caribbean Artists that represent our Contemporary experiences

* Support newly arriving artists from the Caribbean to NYC/USA

CT: For next year, our goals include designing a curriculum based around Caribbean heritage that we can take into schools through residencies. We will train artists so that they can get more work and be directly involved in the community through the schools.

We also want to start master classes in the city over the next year, bringing Caribbean artists, like Cynthia Oliver, who have extensive experience in this contemporary dance work. Also, we want to start a choreographers task force so that we can plan the year of performances together and support one another in producing and presenting our shows.

EYA: Do you see an eventual path towards establishing relationships with contemporary dance presenters and venues around the city?

CT: I would like that, when what we could do with one of these venues would be mutually beneficial. Right now, it's probably better for us to collaborate with smaller arts organizations. We self-produced our first show in collaboration with the Caribbean Cultural Theatre.

EYA: You're a dancer performing in your own work and those of other companies; a dance instructor and fitness trainer, teaching in various venues around town; and now you're leading this burgeoning organization. How do you manage your time and priorities?

CT: I never really had an option to do less. I guess because I'm an immigrant. The stakes are higher. If this fails, I have to go back to Trinidad to a life that I haven't lived for ten years! I've always had to do more, find more, create what I didn't have.

It's possible because I have people around me who really support me and believe in the work that I do. My family in Trinidad are extremely supportive. And there are people that I have been fortunate to meet here, like Sydnie Mosley and Andre Zachery, the companies I've worked with. Bringing ideas or reaching out to people on my behalf or sitting down to help me write proposals. By no means has it been a single-handed effort. I am only able to do it because other people are involved.

EYA: How did you get started in dance...and why dance?

CT: My mom put me in dance classes when I was five. She’d always wanted to get involved with dance, but her mom was a single parent. It was hard for them, schedule-wise and financially. But when she was able to, she put me in, and I never really turned back.

What attracted me to dance is that it was always a challenge, always something new to learn. You never really arrive!

*****

Candace Thompson will present Colliding Scopes/Circles of Inquiry, a new duet (with Nehemoyia Young) as part of the "Dapline! Five on the Black Hand Side" series at University Settlement on July 31. For complete information and ticketing for Dapline!, click here.

Contact Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE: Click!

Candace Thompson
(photo: Rachel Neville)

Candace Thompson, a Trinidad and Tobago native, is a dancer, choreographer and certified fitness professional, specializing in personal training and group fitness. Her dance training is extensive, beginning in Trinidad and Tobago, where she received instruction in modern dance and ballet, at La Danse Caraibe under Heather Henderson-Gordon. She is a graduate of Adelphi University's BFA in Dance with the Ruth St. Denis Award for excellence from the dance department, and has gone on to perform Afro-Caribbean, Classical Modern, Modern/Contemporary, Contemporary/Floor Technique, Jazz, Soca and West African.

She has worked with several companies in Trinidad and Tobago including Trinity Dance Theater, Astor Johnson Repertory Dance Company and Elle NYTT (for Machel Montano HD) as well as US based companies and choreographers including, Andrea E. Woods-Valdez, Andre Zachery, Christal Brown, David Gordon, Forces of Nature Dance Theater, Germaul Barnes, Leda Meredith, Lynn Parkerson, Makeda Thomas, Sita Frederick, Sydnie L. Mosley and Trebien Pollard.

Candace is driven to perform work that is challenging both physically and emotionally, and is always seeking new performance opportunities and experiences to hone her skills. She currently performs with Areytos Performance Works, Elle NYTT, Renegade Performance Group, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and in her own solo performance work ContempoCaribe. Candace looks forward to adding to the dance landscape in the U.S. and the Caribbean, through her latest collaborative initiative, Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, and to deepening her mastery in performance.

Candace's career in fitness began haphazardly in high school, where she entered and won the aerobic burnout competition. She has since become an IFTA certified Group Fitness Leader, ACE certified Personal Trainer, Int. Pilates Mat instructor, TRX® Suspension Trainer, TRX® Rip Trainer, TRX® FORCE certified instructor and a Level 1 Kettlebell Concepts Instructor. Candace has taught at gyms around NYC including, Harbor Fitness, Lucille Roberts, Fluid Fitness NY, New You Fitness and Crown Heights Yoga & FItness. Currently, Candace does in-home training for clients in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and teaches Soca Dance at Mark Morris Dance Center.

Paloma McGregor builds her net...for us

Yesterday, I started thinking about how dance artists should market their genius for adaptability, for doing more with less. I've also been watching dance in fairly small spaces lately--not always a bad thing. Then Paloma McGregor brought Building A Better Fishtrap/Part 1 to BAAD!, premiering an evening-length version of work explored, over the last four years, in various venues. At BAAD!, this beautiful and moving ensemble piece is danced across a shallow strip of floor. It's a big burst of heart, and the dancers dance the hell out of it. If you sit in the front row, as I did, watch that your feet don't get trapped like fish.

McGregor, a native of St. Croix, draws spirit and imagery from, as she writes, "the vanishing fishing tradition of [her] 89-year old father." The work feels like a danced bedtime tale with dreamy happenings and archetypal, beloved characters who shapeshift form with ease. Indeed, like a cozy bedtime tale, it works best by leaving ample room for your own imaginings and feelings.

Empty chairs speak of separated or departed loved ones, the ever-present past. A "road" materializes when a young lady--bearing a modest, old-fashioned suitcase and a vision--strides forth while others hustle to pave the air with a row of chair seats continuously arranged below her advancing feet. As our loving storyteller, McGregor proffers not too much information, just enough--articles and spare gestures that suggest spearing, sorting, stirring; a wheel gently held aloft like a mystical symbol or used in the clever pantomiming of a family excursion; long spliced and braided cords that, when swept across the breadth of the space, evoke both the act of fishing and the foamy rush of Caribbean tide.

Now and again, a voice floats into the space, words suggesting identity and deep nourishment from which one can never be entirely separated. (I have been here before, maybe as a tree...The water is the Grand Queen of us all.) Still, dancers like Christine King and Audrey Hailes don't need words to connect when playful, girlish body language spins clear, universal "conversation" and inclusion.

That inclusion includes us, too, in a literal, ingenious and necessary way that I will not reveal here. Building A Better Fishtrap prepares and invites its audience, casting a spell that inspires trust. Last night, we fell into McGregor's welcome with gratitude.

Performances by Christine King, Audrey Hailes, Stephanie Mas, Erica Saucedo, Ricarrdo Valentine
Scenic Design: Paloma McGregor
Costumes: Kym Chambers

Lighting: Susan Hamburger
Soundscore: Everett Saunders
Text: Ebony Noelle Golden

Building A Better Fishtrap/Part 1 continues tonight at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information, click here, and for tickets, click here.

McGregor continues to build her fishtrap. Over the next two years, her Building A Better Fishtrap project moves on to BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and to sites in Red Hook and along the Bronx River. "With each iteration," McGregor writes, "the hope is to deepen the connections collaborators and audiences have with one another's legacies and the future of our embattled water spaces." Keep up with McGregor's progress at Angela's Pulse.

BAAD!
2474 Westchester Avenue, Bronx
(map/directions)

Poet as witness: Claudia Rankine reads from "Citizen: An American Lyric"

On October 30, 2014 Claudia Rankine gave this reading from Citizen: An American Lyric (2014 National Book Award) and discussed American racism, police violence, and responsibility at the Williams College Museum of Art. Her words, of course, remain fresh, relevant and insightful.

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!

Cumbe's on the move: Celebrate on January 31

Brooklyn's three-year old Cumbe: Center for African and Diasporan Dance has been forced out of its Fulton Street home, the building sold to make way for a residential tower. The directors are seeking interim space for classes. (Ideas? Click here.) In the meantime, you're invited to join the Cumbe community for a night of dancing and music including a live performance by Brown Rice Family band and mini-dance classes with the center's teachers.

The Moving Party

Saturday, January 31st, 9pm

Admission: $10-$20 sliding scale

Founded by Dominique Bravo, Pat Hall, and Jimena Martinez, Cumbe is the new home for African and diaspora dance in Brooklyn, bringing together classes and cultural education for dances from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. At Cumbe, young people, adults, and families alike immerse themselves in the joy and vitality of music and dance from the African diaspora.

Through a rich array of classes and dynamic teachers, students from novice to the experienced learn the rhythms and movements of Senegal, Guinea, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, and a broad range of other cultures. Performances, talks, and dance parties encourage a deeper understanding of the origins, meaning and evolution of these many dances, as well as connections between them. 
Marking life moments big and small, joyous and fierce, dances from Africa and countries nourished and inspired by African traditions bring tremendous spirit to our modern lives. Through dance and music, Cumbe creates a community that celebrates exuberance, sensuality, power, and laughter! We look forward to supporting this community as we continue to offer a selection of classes in various locations through Brooklyn while we search for our new home. After three wonderful years of African and diaspora dance, we invite you to keep moving with us!

For further information on Cumbe, the move and The Moving Party, click here.

Cumbe
558 Fulton Street, 2nd Floor (near Flatbush Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

This week, Cynthia Oliver goes BOOM!

R-l: Leslie Cuyjet and Cynthia Oliver in Boom!
(photos by Julieta Cervantes)

Acclaimed dancer, choreographer and educator Cynthia Oliver presents the world premiere of Boom!--a duet with Leslie Cuyjet--at New York Live Arts this Thursday evening. Yesterday, she put up with some of my "really provocative questions," as she called them.

EYA: Who are you? What elements make up who you are as a dancemaker?

CO: That's a question I've been asking myself since I was a teenager. For many years, I worked hard to think about it outside of what I do. In some ways, I am what I do in terms of how I move in the world. But first: a person, a woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an artist. Not that the order of it shows any priority, but it's a humble mix.

EYA: What do you most value? What do you find non-negotiable?

CO: Being honest with myself, my relationships--my family, my friends--and being human and humane. Those guideposts in my work have never, ever led me wrong. They helped me steer the course of each piece clearly.

EYA: What challenges you?

CO: Fear. I feel like I push through fear every day. It's there. I acknowledge it. But I know that I'm not going to accomplish anything by buckling to it. I have to do what it is that's inspiring me anyway, and once I get on the other side of it, it's like a whole other world opens up.

I feel like fear has always been my biggest challenge. I'm not a very outward person, although I love people. I have some wonderful friends and enjoy social situations, but my husband is the real social butterfly. I am not at all. I push through that and see what happens. I feel that I have done okay with that.

EYA: Through what perceptual channels do you best perceive things?

CO: I think of my intuition as my strongest perceptual channel. I've learned how to trust it, listen to it and act on it. Because when I don't, I pay. I remember early on in my tenure [at University of Illinois], I created a piece with a large gospel group with the Black Chorus out there. I had never worked with more than five people in a piece. This was a chorus of forty-five. I was choreographing them and eight dancers.

The piece was called Whisper to Shout, and it addressed this very thing: I had started to realize that if I don't listen to the whisper, the shout was going to be a humdinger. The shout was going to kick my behind. So I had to attune my ear to the whisper and be much more sensitive and much more aware of the whisper. And that's just a matter of trust and not saying, Oh, no, I couldn't possibly be right with that feeling that I should act on. That's my strongest perceptual channel.

EYA: What audience would you most like to reach?

Honestly, I just want humans there. On so many different levels, I feel that the work can speak to a lot of different people. On the obvious level, yes, women audiences, Caribbean audiences, people of color. But at the same time, all of the concerns that I address--those that are both obvious and blatant and those that are layered and more subtle--are universal concerns that we all, as humans, negotiate. I want as many kinds of folks in the room as possible sitting right next to each other.

I think my audience is a reflection of my own life. I have always had a very diverse group of people around me. I grew up in an international community in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. When I moved to the states to be a professional dancer, that is something I continued. When I went to college, I found that the African American community in the states tended to be more segregated than where I came from. Not that there is not segregation there. But it's one of those things where you'd still see a lot of mixing, especially in those heady days of the '70s, when I was in high school. Less so now. It's much more polarized now [due to economic disparity, changes wrought by disasters such as Hurricane Hugo and other factors.] But at that time, it was very different. That's how I got exposed to a certain kind of experimental dance there, that breadth of experience across communities.

EYA: Do you need an outside eye on your work? Or are you able to be objective about what you do?

CO: I do both. I trust my own eye and my own sensibilities about what needs to happen--what kinds of sequence, what kinds of material, what kinds of language. And because I do a lot of research in the work, I trust that. I also strongly believe that none of us can be objective, and it helps to have a trusted eye in the room. The key word there is trusted. I make sure that the person I ask to come and watch, while the work is in that delicate state, is someone who can put aside their own aesthetic, their own agenda, and look at what I'm trying to do and ask me questions that will help me clarify what I'm trying to do, not what they want. I find that that combination--knowing when to bring people in, going back and revising, and then bringing folks in again--that's been really helpful to me.

EYA: What do you consider to be the most important qualities of a serious or professional artist?

CO: Openness. Sensitivity. A willingness to see beyond where you are and what your work is, to see the broader relationship to your field, to the world, to folks around you. Mostly, openness.

EYA: Why is dance your focus?

CO: The full embodiment. I actually didn't start out as a dancer. My sisters danced and, I think since I was the last of six kids, my parents just said, Go on with your sisters!, to get me out of the house.

I was a visual artist. My parents let me try a lot of things. I tried music. I was terrible at music. But painting, drawing, was my arena. I thought I'd make my living as an architect. I took courses in physics and calculus in high school thinking I was going to go in that direction. Dance was really a hobby early on.

And then I had this mentor who fell in love with me and I with her. She was from Kurt Jooss [the German choreographer] and had been in the Caribbean for decades and had a dance school. I would go there and study Afro-Caribbean dance during the week, and she invited me to start taking ballet and improvisation with her. Then she kept putting me onstage, and she encouraged me to move in this direction. And I loved it! I loved the physicality of dance. I'm a swimmer. So, moving on land was really nice too! She would bring dance companies to the island to expose young people to these companies. So, I saw George Faison's Universal Dance Experience; that really blew my mind. I saw a lot of different companies from Europe, South America, the Caribbean.

Recruiters came at the end of high school, and I thought, I really should do this! This feels like something I could really sink my teeth into. A big concern for my dad was, "How're you going to afford to live?" My mom--a brilliant artist and a seamstress--was different. She was like, "Take your wings and fly, girl. Do that art."

See the world premiere of Cynthia Oliver's BOOM! 

at New York Live Arts, Oct 23-25. 

Click here for details and tickets.

Related events:

October 23 at 6:30pm: Come Early Conversation: Sequencing Non-Linear Narratives, choreographer and educator Nia Love discusses the creative practice of Cynthia Oliver

October 24: Stay Late Discussion: Her History - Her Present - Her Future, Cynthia Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet in conversation with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Cynthia Oliver’s work is the visceral evidence of an incongruous mixture of aesthetics. Steeped in the everyday sounds of black voices and bodies moving in time and space in the Caribbean of her youth, Ms. Oliver was encouraged to explore ballet, dance dramas and site specific improvisational experiments led by Atti van den Berg - a former Kurt Jooss dance drama company member/performer. All the while she absorbed both the informal and formal of the Afro-Caribbean dance canons in the US Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the region. These vastly differing experiences defined her childhood coming into art. Moving in this way led her to an eclectic career in New York City and abroad in the world of performance art and experimental dancing with folks as diverse as The Caribbean Dance Company, Theatre Dance Inc., the David Gordon/Pick Up Company, Ronald Kevin Brown/EVIDENCE and Bebe Miller. She currently performs in Tere O’Connor’s Sister and BLEED dance works. Oliver has studied and been a part of the black avant garde theatre world, performing in the works of numerous playwrights, most notably, Laurie Carlos’ White Chocolate for my Father, and Vanquished by Voodoo, and Ntozake Shange’s A Photograph Lover’s In Motion, also directed by Ms. Carlos; Greg Tate’s My Darling Gremlin; and choreographing for theatrical productions like The University of Illinois’ theatre company production of George C. Wolff’s Colored Museum directed by Lisa Gaye Dixon. Her choreography for theater has been performed at Minnesota’s Penumbra and Pillsbury House Theaters, New York’s La MaMa Etc., Syncronicity Space and Aaron Davis Hall.

Oliver has been creating dance works since 1991. A mélange of dance, theatre and the spoken word, her pieces reflect her background and interests, incorporating the textures of Caribbean performance with African and American sensibilities. Named “Outstanding Young Choreographer” by reviewer Frank Werner in German Magazine Ballet Tanz early in her career, Oliver has since received numerous grants and awards including most notably, a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, two Illinois Arts Council Choreography Fellowships, a Creative Capital award, a Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production grant, NEFA Touring support, NPN Creation Funds, a CalArts Alpert Award nomination and a prestigious University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is a Professor of dance. In addition to her performance credits, Oliver holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University. She has published widely and is the author of Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean (University Press of Mississippi. 2009).

Geoffrey Holder, 84

Geoffrey Holder, Dancer, Actor, Artist and Much More, Dies at 84
by Jennifer Dunning and William McDonald, The New York Times, October 6, 2014

An evening screening of films by dance artist Gabri Christa

Gabri Christa and Niles Ford
in Savoneta (2008)
(photo: Dolph van Stapele) 

Museum of the Moving Image

presents

Dancing with Our Past

film screening and live event

appearance by filmmaker/choreographer 

Gabri Christa

followed by a reception sponsored by 

Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands

Friday, October 24, 7pm

Gabri Christa
(photo: Malgorzata Headshot)

Born and raised in Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean, Gabri Christa came to filmmaking after a successful career as a choreographer and dancer. She choreographed and danced with companies such as Danza Contemporanea de Cuba (Cuba) and the Bill T. Jones Dance Company (United States). 

Christa's short films connect the relationship of historic buildings and sites to their environment, and reflect upon the people and cultures that inhabit them. Each film—Quarantine (2007, 10 mins.), Savoneta (2008, 14 mins.), and Kasita (2014, 21 mins.)—sheds a different light on Dutch history through dance, text, music, and movement. Filmed on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Bonaire, they tell stories of the Dutch African diaspora, from a time when Peter Stuyvesant was governor of both New Amsterdam and the Dutch Caribbean.

Space, Place and Memory

How to capture the memory of a space, the place where people lived, loved, fought, a place of such reverence all loaded with slavery's past? How does the body feel and deal with the memories of those feelings in that space? A body moving in space is very concrete, especially in an empty space. I could speak about form and shape and make it physical, but what drives me is more spiritual. I long to communicate a feeling, a smell, a memory, one that is not necessarily mine. I want to capture the spirit that still lingers and the flood of images, smells, stories that call out from behind the dust, or make an interpretation of that feeling crawling onto my skin. People once lived and worked here, and a space absent of them and their things still speaks loudly, begging not to be forgotten. So I am telling tales of sound, movement is what is left, without words and sometimes with. Glorious amidst a bright sun, now associated with a Caribbean vacation, but the past still lingers and is still relevant. How to capture that on film? How to imagine this in movement? Those essential questions I explore while I made these films and in all three I take a different approach, combining the old (music and dance) with the new (music dance image).

--Gabri Christa

For complete information and tickets, 

click here.

Dancing with Our Past is part of the Changing the Picture (2014) series, organized by Chief Curator David Schwartz and Warrington Hudlin.

This ongoing series celebrates and explores the work of film and television artists of color who are bringing diverse voices to the screen. The series, which consists of screenings and discussions with directors, writers, actors, scholars, and more, includes contemporary work as well as historically significant work that has played an important role in the evolving attempt to “change the picture” and bring a wider variety of voices and visions to the moving image. 

Click here for more information on Changing the Picture.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue (at 37th Street), Astoria, Queens
(map/directions)

Caribbean Cultural Center to break ground for new home in El Barrio

The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute invites you to celebrate the groundbreaking for its new home in East Harlem, planned to open in 2016 at 120 East 125th Street, a four-story, landmark Romanesque Revival-style firehouse completed in 1889. CCCADI, founded by Marta Moreno Vega in 1976, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring and documenting the cultures of Africa in the New World and to connecting Diaspora communities to their root cultures.

Special events will be held on Tuesday, September 16:

10am-11:45am (BY INVITATION ONLY)
Groundbreaking Ceremony
                                         
11:46am-2pm (open to the public, free with RSVP*)
Launch and demonstration of new CCCADI mobile app
Live musical presentation

For more information, click here.

Directions to 120 East 125th Street (MAP):

Subways: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to 125th Street. Walk to Lexington Avenue.
Buses: M15, 101,100 to 125th Street
Metro North to 125th Street

*RSVP to: www.rsvpcccadigroundbreaking.eventbrite.com

For information: Contact event coordinator, Lisa Banks at (516) 353-8048/email at banks244@hotmail.com

Learn more about the CCCADI's cultural, educational and advocacy activities here.

What I learned: Cuba's Danay Suárez, "Yo Aprendí"

Danay Suárez Web site

Danay Suárez Facebook page

Latin Alternative Music Conference

(New York City, July 8-12)

BRIC House welcomes musician Leyla McCalla tomorrow night

The Stoop Series: Leyla McCalla

Tuesday, February 11, 7pm

Stoop at BRIC House

Admission: FREE

Multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla (Carolina Chocolate Drops), celebrates her new album release featuring music reflecting her Haitian roots and eclectic life experiences. Dialogue with Régine M. Roumain of Brooklyn’s Haiti Cultural Exchange follows the performance.

Information

BRIC House
647 Fulton Street (Enter on Rockwell Place), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

William "Bunny Rugs" Clarke, 65

William 'Bunny Rugs' Clarke Dead: Lead Singer Of Third World Dies At 65
by Howard Campbell, The Huffington Post, February 4, 2014

Guyana censors its calypsonians

In Guyana, Feeling Stifled After Needling Government in Song
by Girish Gupta, The New York Times, December 5, 2013

Kyle Abraham in a luminous film by Gabri Christa

Dance artist and filmmaker Gabri Christa wrote me this note about 2013 MacArthur Award winner, Kyle Abraham:

When I saw Kyle dance (in 2007), I was immediately smitten--and also because he looks like my family. Yes, I wanted to make a film with my dad, and Kyle looks so much like my dad when he was younger, it was a no-brainer. So we lived together and worked together in my home town, and he is also a wonderful person who deserves all the love he is getting. So here they are: my dad Marcel Stomp and my lil bro Kyle.

From TenduTV's Essential Dance Film collection on YouTube: 

An older man looks at his younger self (Kyle Abraham) explore an old quarantine building for enslaved Africans. Quarantine is the first film in Gabri Christa's Another Building series, which features short narrative dance films that take place in and around historic buildings and sites connected to the Dutch History.

The quarantine building was in Curaçao and housed slaves who were too sick to be taken to the Americas. 

For more information on the Another Building series, click here.

Jean-Léon Destiné, 94

Jean-Léon Destiné, Dancer, Dies at 94
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, January 30, 2013