WORKS IN MOTION
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
-James Baldwin
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
-James Baldwin
2020
“The Movement of Joy” defines and imagines joy through the archiving of performance, looking and shifting the concept of oral histories to movement histories. This digital thesis project is an exploration and series of embodied mediations of storytelling from an improvisational practice deriving from the African American Spiritual. There is an emphasis on remembering and understanding the histories that live in our own physical bodies, creating a pathway for collective acknowledgment, while creating space for the immediate. In its fullness, “The Movement of Joy” is an ongoing practice aimed to amass joy testimonials through community, individual, honesty, and authentic artistry.
Collective Artists - Marquis “Ten Thousand” Burton, Dana Venerable, Emily Powrie, Robin Lazarra and Lite Work Media, Alana Adetola, Kate Mackey, Zhanna Reed, Curtis Lovell, Drea D’Nur, Edreys Wajed
2019-2020
This performative lecture investigates how the rise of the black “stud” creates new transparencies for the ways we see queer identities, and how that visibility disrupts the production/ reproduction of queer representation in hip-hop.
2019
A collaborative filmmaking experiment, “Live Your Art,” documents the experience of living and working in Buffalo as an artist. Bringing together four diverse UB artists, the short film is a celebration of creativity across the disciplines. The production team, led by UB filmmaker Mani Mehrvarz, takes cameras into spaces where art is made, and then leads viewers out into the city on a search for sources of inspiration, collaboration and community.
IMPROVISATION PERFORMANCE WITH RECORDING ARTIST
2019
This collaboration with recording artist Drea D’nur is a work that seeks to discover self. I’m Sorry. is an ode to relaitonships and the ways we seek understanding of internal peace. Through an improvisation practice of listening, movement tells the story of heartbreak and courage.
2019
This work seeks to show the lack of representation of black women in academe and the choices needed to create change. In collaboration with University at Buffalo PhD candidates
Dana venerable (English) and Cassandra Scherr (English)
with Music by Nina Simone and text written by performers. These black women choose to raise awareness with their voices and movements to identify a problem starting in the very institution in which they inhabit.
2018
Stories are representations of the past. They lead us to definitions of the self and ideas of what we can be in the future. “Bridging the Gap” looks at personal stories of identity to form a community. This dance theatre work seeks to find the commonality of people in a post-fact society that often chooses to see the difference.
DANCE FOR FILM ONLINE PUBLICATION THEATRE JOURNAL
2018
The Absence of the Other Flesh: The Dismissal of the Black Body in America, is a dance for film project that shows how gestures of resistance exist in America. Through structures representing power, and images that reflect the deaths of black bodies murdered by police, I aim to show the joy, pain, intellect, and consequence of being black in America.
2017
A focus on gestures of resistance during the era of Black Lives Matter. Chosen for American College Dance Association's National Performance at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.