Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.: Receiving our spiritual nourishment

Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

is a choreographer who researches, illustrates and creates

 from an African-American male perspective. 

In his work, he tackles issues resulting from 

a capitalistic imperialist patriarchal white supremacist system.

(photo by Ricarrdo Valentine)

***

Love & Forgiveness: I am really interested in the social function of love and forgiveness. I question a society that calls itself a “Christian nation” yet remains at odds with the practice of that very philosophy. I’ve found that love and forgiveness in this society is derived out of a white heterosexual patriarchal religious structure. In order to receive these vibrations (because we are humans and understand frequencies i.e. feelings, hence the use), according to the dominant socio-religion you have to assimilate to the specific ways in which love and forgiveness is imparted to you. For me the concept of love and forgiveness is found in the humanity of my mother’s and grandmother’s hands. Where do we receive our spiritual nourishment?

Collard greens and Corn bread go together like love and forgiveness an ancient healing practice. Most of us forget the ways in which we’ve fucked up. Our mothers and grandmothers, and this a general statement, are always there fueling us since birth. It’s up to us as growing citizens of our communities to look at these finite yet very embodied experiences of love and forgiveness as tools of resistance. I ingested the magic of my mother and grandmother, becoming realized, knowing that in order for me to pass through this plane of existence I’d need to learn how to love myself and forgive myself and reciprocate that with others. How do we become active in love and forgiveness? Let’s cook more, sharing the warmth of our souls with hungry hearts and stomachs.  

-- Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.

how to survive a plague

by Brother(hood) Dance! 

(Ricarrdo Valentine and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.)

Danspace Project at St.Marks Church

Platform 2016: Lost & Found

Co-curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls

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Colleen Thomas Dance: Looking beyond the blueprint

Samantha Allen of Colleen Thomas Dance
in Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint
Photo: Alex Escalante

"We see what we think we know, not what stands before us," Colleen Thomas writes, introducing Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint, presented by 92Y Harkness Dance Center's new Dig Dance weekend series.

An artist's handiwork gets complicated, re-imagined and completed by what the individual observer brings to it. In the shifting gloom of 92Y's Buttenwieser Hall, we encounter Thomas's sensibilities, ideas and decisions, bringing "the stories we keep telling ourselves" about ourselves and about everything else. As she writes further, "Life is here, this moment. Now....and now...and now."

With the exception of composer John McGrew, who performs his score live, every single one of the men in Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint--Ehizoje Azeke, Marc Mann, Nathan Trice and the striking Orlando Hunter--are Black. Startled to notice this, I returned to Thomas's words and wondered if anyone else had experienced a similar jolt.  (Tamara Joy Clarke, also Black and also a dancer, passes through and around the space. But in this work, she's primarily serving as vocalist.) Thomas and the other women dancers--Samantha Allen, Jenna Riegel and Jessica Stroh--are white, and we had just watched them, stationed across the space, scaring us with images of obsessive self-grooming, as if they wanted to rub every bit of clothing, hair and flesh away from their inflamed bodies. And then, BLACKOUT. And now, these four men--each one grand and vulnerable.

Knowing of Thomas's concern with how we get ensnared in "the web of perceived social, gender and racial narratives," I felt she'd just dropped a grenade in our midst. We have seen multicultural dance ensembles; Thomas, herself, has danced with some of them. But the demographic makeup of Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint--and the balance of prominence and power within it--are rare in contemporary dance.

Tricia Toliver's preternatural lighting turns this hall--a dimly-lit space with a heavy, heavy feel--into a camera obscura or chamber of hallucinations, the perfect setting for the stark and fiery choreography. We're made aware of an outside--a black drape gets pulled aside; an opened door emits a blast of white light--to this tense and murky inside. Toliver takes the simple facts of folks--Have you seen dancers when they are off-duty?--and splashes harsh light across bodies, turning them spooky or monumental.

We can't trust our eyes. Or maybe sometimes we can. But it's important, first of all, to make the effort to look. For "life is here, this moment. Now....and now...and now."

Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint continues tonight at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm.

92nd St Y (Buttenwieser Hall)
Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)