92Y Harkness samples Dancing While Black: December 7

Paloma McGregor

Performing Justice: Dancing While Black

presented by Fridays@Noon

92Y Harkness Dance Center

Friday, December 7

Noon to 1:30pm

Eva Yaa Asantewaa and Dancing While Black founder Paloma McGregor in conversation

Performances by Maria Bauman/MBDance and Jaimé Yawa Dzandu

DANCING WHILE BLACK is an artist-led initiative that supports the diverse work of Black dance artists by cultivating platforms for process, performance, dialogue and documentation. We bring the voices of black dance artists from the periphery to the center, providing opportunities to self-determine the languages and lenses that define their work.

Information and tickets!

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Exploring writing with Dancing While Black's 2016-17 fellows

Rear, at window:
Paloma McGregor, founder of Dancing While Black
Left to right: Kesha Cox Mckee, Melanie Greene, Eva Yaa Asantewaa,
Jaimé Dzandu, Katrina Reid and Brittany Williams

Every now and then, you have an experience that inspires faith in the future. I was lucky enough to get the chance to work with Paloma McGregor's current group of fellows in her Dancing While Black Fellowship program, teaching a master class in dance writing.

We met at BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange) on a lightly snowy Saturday and shared some creative dance writing, thoughts on the state of the art and its documentation, social justice concerns, tears, warm laughter and some delish Thai food from Park Slope's Song. I could not have wished for better company.

So, thank you to DWB fellows Brittany Williams, Jaimé Dzandu, Katrina Reid, Kesha Cox Mckee and Melanie Greene! And thanks to Paloma and to Marýa Wethers for inviting me to teach, to hold this space and to meet such wonderful women.

DANCING WHILE BLACK is an artist-led initiative that supports the diverse work of Black dance artists by cultivating platforms for process, performance, dialogue and documentation. We bring the voices of black dance artists from the periphery to the center, providing opportunities to self-determine the languages and lenses that define their work.

Learn more about Dancing While Black, 

a project of Angela's Pulse, here.

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"Her Fishtrap": a reflection from Ni'Ja Whitson

Choreographer Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

In Her Fishtrap, dance artist and guest writer Ni’Ja Whitson reflects on Building a Better Fishtrap, a work presented at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange this month by choreographer Paloma McGregor in collaboration with visual artist Sara Jimenez, installation designer Vassi Spanos and sound designer Everett Saunders.

Photos by Whitney Browne

***

Her Fishtrap

Cold jar swings
from the ceiling.
Coating
its translucence
interior
thick
off white spill.
A residue
memory, and time.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

It is another of McGregor’s portals.

Building a Better Fishtrap commands its audience receive and witness with the same stamina the soloist McGregor rigorously expels. The performance takes place between three floors of Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a spatial expanse that mirrors the vast locations of physical, object, and media vocabularies embodied. She is wielder/welder/poet/cyclone/octopus/child/magician/dreamer.

Fishtrap’s audience becomes her ocean-bound garden, being toiled and rooted as the piece unfolds. One of the work’s most striking and successful elements is the manipulation of object and/in space. Among all three floors, her unique world is made by the ways in which the calculated manipulation of objects installed in the performance space are activated. On the first floor, mason jars are rolled and spun, opened and emptied, carried with care and abandoned. McGregor, at one point, makes a clever emptying roll of a jar, releasing a swell of aromatic ground mint, then proceeds to further make her/self a conjurer, shifting the air through the sense of smell. She then wafts the jar to the witnesses, puts mint grounds in hand, over body, head and floor. She cleanses and reopens. The doing in this work is its magic. And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

She breaks
through time. Strung
as a clothesline
the years hang.
With back wing
spread the ocean
sorceress stops
let light wonder over
body.
She sings her birth.
Dances a life
from the deep.

It was born to her.

McGregor is a masterful constructionist; her choreographic structure is tightly considered, thus where she “plays” she, too, devises. Strategically and uniquely working within a grounded knowledge of African diasporic vocabularies (and beyond), Fishtrap makes meaning in the employment of improvisation as a virtuostic practice. And the lines where presumably “set” or improvisationally set material live, exist here as wonderfully blurred. The dance of this performance is as much in the spaces of (brief) stillness as it is in McGregor’s turns, arm curves, undulations, and foot pounds. This is critical to the work; there are no disposable gestures.

Paloma McGregor
in Building a Better Fishtrap
(photo: Whitney Browne)

Black mama joy

spin her.
Wave skirt and dive
into.
She wet.
We dry. But we all swim.
Black mama child girl
cross a net sea
to the other side.
We wait
at the shore
she our people
bones in the dark.

Paloma McGregor’s Building a Better Fishtrap is an embodied poem and slicing exposition of memory. It, at times lullabies in quiet movement or task, then within an instant destabilizes through near-cinematographic staging and striking movement. Fishtrap gifts what it inquiries: play and recall.

Her Fishtrap
©2016 Ni’Ja Whitson

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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)

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!

Open Season: conversation on the arts and urban justice

Open Season

An Evening of Art and Conversation 

about our Culture of Confinement

Wednesday, Dec 10, 6pm

at Urban Justice Center Human Rights Project

Featuring:

•Dr. William Jelani Cobb, UConn Professor and New Yorker contributor
•Bryonn Bain, Poet and New York University Professor
•Esther Armah, MSNBC Contributor
•Taneya Gethers-Muhammed, Brooklyn Public Library
•Lumumba Bandele, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
•Paloma McGregor, Dancer and Choreographer

•Moderator: Shani Jamila, Artist and Human Rights Project Director

Dance performances curated with Dancing While Black

Soundscape by DJ Jahsonic

Community partners include the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, NYU’s Prison Education Program, Angela’s Pulse and Articulations. Additional support is being provided by The Studio Museum of Harlem.

This event is open to all.  A $15 donation is suggested, but no one will be turned away for a lack of funds. Please register below, a ticket is required.

To RSVP, please click here and fill out the form at the base of the page.

Contact: openseasonrsvp@gmail.com

Urban Justice Center Human Rights Project
40 Rector Street (at West Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

We're Dancing While Black. And we're golden.

Were you at BAAD! last night for Paloma McGregor's Dancing While Black panel (Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Greg Tate and cultural anthropologist Aimee Cox with moderator Shani Jamil) and the amazing performance that followed? If so, I'm sure you walked out of there with more inspiration, motivation and energy than most people would know what to do with. And I'm hoping you know what to do with it, because we all benefit when you do. Live your life like it's golden.

If you didn't get there last night, you might miss a chance to buy a ticket for tonight's repeat of the performance. It's a smallish space, and clearly the artists know lots and lots of supportive folks. But give it a try.

The set features developing works by emerging dancemakers

• Adia Tamar Whitaker and Brian Polite
• Ebony Noelle Golden

and Rashida Bumbray's right shout Run Mary Run

Also, today, BAAD! hosts a full day of Dancing While Black master classes. Click here for information or call BAAD! at 718-918-2110.

Four artists talk about dancing while Black

Artist Talk | Dancing While Black: Collective(s) Action

with HNYPN Artist-in-Residence 

Paloma McGregor

Dance artist Paloma McGregor

Thursday, February 13 (7pm to 9pm)

An evening with the founders of Ase Dance Theatre Collective, Dance Diaspora Collective and The Body Ecology Performance Ensemble, who have developed potent, virtuosic performance practices rooted in cultivating collectivism. In a field that is so often individualistic or product-driven, how and why are Rashida Bumbray, Ebony Noelle Golden and Adia Tamar Whitaker making contemporary performance work aligned with community building? Join us in experiencing their work and vision.

This event is free and open to the public. A photo ID is required to enter NYU buildings.

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Paloma McGregor's Dancing While Black

I was most honored when dance artist Paloma McGregor invited me to participate as a storyteller in her recent event, Dancing While Black, hosted by New York University's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where McGregor is Artist in Residence. Among artists such as Nia Love and John Perpener and the amazing dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild, invited guests and community told stories about the experience of being Black in the dance field--the good, the bad and, yes, the ugly--and banded together to share movement explorations of our journeys and understandings. The energy in the room was fantastic--warm, respectful, supportive and motivating.

To read a brief report on that special evening by Norma Porter Anthony, publisher and editor of Black Dance Magazine, click here.

And we're certainly not finished! Connect with McGregor's ongoing Dancing While Black project here.

Black dance scholars are invited to connect with Dr. Dixon Gottschild's Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving here.

What's moving downtown, moving the Bronx

Look sharp!

There's dance moving all over town... 

La MaMa Moves Dance Festival

Chamber Works 1--featuring Dark Matter by Juliette Mapp; present.tense (progressive) by Maura Donohue; and So be it--not a piece--miniatures for five by Vicky Shick. May 11-13. La MaMa’s The Club, 74A East 4th Street, 2nd Floor.[information and tickets]

Beauty--Jane Comfort and Company. "...a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty." May 17-20, 7:30pm La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor. [information and tickets]

La MaMa
[map/directions]

Dancing While Black: Voices from the Bush
a presentation of BAAD!'s 2012 Boogie Down Dance Series

Thursday, May 17, 8pm

Featuring current and former dancers from Urban Bush Women--Maria Bauman, LoveForte (Marjani Forte and Nia Love), Paloma McGregor and Samantha Speis--who present their own brazen dance works as part of Dancing While Black, "an artist-led project/initiative that explores many questions including what does it mean to be a Black artist today in order to shift the power of contextualizing work and articulating aesthetic values into the hands, and bodies, of black dancers themselves."

For more information on this and all Boogie Down festival events and to purchase tickets, click here or call 718-842-5223.

BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
841 Barretto Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx
(map/directions)

Dance and the Occupy Movement

Movement Research presents

Dance and the Occupy Movement

Wednesday, January 25 (7:30pm)

Organized by Abigail Levine

Jimmy's no. 43, in the backroom
43 East 7th Street
between 2nd Avenue and Bowery, Manhattan
(directions)

Exploring an expanded notion of choreography and how it is related to our social and political organization and discovery of ourselves as individuals working within a temporary collective...circling and questioning around ideas of a moving community.

--Movement Research Festival Spring 2011 brochure

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

--Declaration of the Occupation, NYC General Assembly

What are the points of contact between experimental, contemporary dance and the Occupy Movement? As spatial and embodied practice? As social investigation and organization? As improvisation and movement? As agents of change? How do and might these moving communities interact? How do we approach (public and private) space in New York City? Barbara Browning, Daniel Lang-Levitsky, Paloma McGregor, Clarinda Mac Low, and Edisa Weeks open a conversation about this creative political moment.