Monday, January 18 2010

INTERNATIONAL dance artiste Makeda Thomas has developed a groundbreaking Dance and Performance Institute in Port-of-Spain. This is the first of its kind in Trinidad and Tobago – to offer artists residencies in contemporary and traditional dance and performance studies in an open, comfortable environment with many opportunities for interaction, exchange and learning.

The goal of the residency is to provide a space where professional dance artists from the Caribbean can engage in creation, conversation and performance with dance and performing artists from around the world.

Chicago-based dance scholar Dr Celia Weiss Bambara and Tasha Connolly are the first artists in residence. Bambara recently offered a performance of Kenbe, Amour, Colére, Folie:

Improvisations for Love at The Republic, which is located in Port of Spain. She will return for the second part of her residency in March to teach workshops in Dancemaking/Choreography in Tobago and at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. As part her self-directed residency, Connolly is studying with Dragon de Souza of Keylemanjahro School of Arts and

Culture and producing a weblog about her research in the moko jumbie tradition.

“We’ve had applicants from Iceland, Thailand, the US, Argentina, Ghana, Jamaica – from all around world. There is tremendous interest in the programme and is coming to Trinidad and Tobago to create, research and dialogue about dance and performance. I’m encouraged by the

response and look forward to the growth of the Dance and Performance Institute. With so few functional art spaces, especially spaces dedicated exclusively to dance and performance art, the prospects this holds for emerging and established movement artists are great,” Thomas says.

The Institute hosts a salon series which serves as a forum for open and in-depth discourse on contemporary issues in dance and performance. The salon is organised around specific themes around the artist, methods, and pedagogies of contemporary dance and performance in the Caribbean. A recent salon on “Dance Pedagogy” included dance artists Sonja Dumas and Nicole

Wesley of the Academy for the Performing Arts, The University of Trinidad and Tobago.

Dr Gabrielle Hosein, lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies will host an upcoming salon on “Trinidad Masculinities and Femininities” later this month. Other Trinidad artists and thinkers engaged in the Institute include Tony Hall (Jouvay Process), Robert Young

(Race, Identity & Being Here) and Attillah Springer (Women & Resistance in Canboulay).

Among the artists expected to hold residencies in the 2010 Institute:

Ananya Chatterjea (USA), dancer, choreographer, dance scholar, and dance educator, envisions her work in the field of dance as a “call to action” with a particular focus on women artists of colour. She is Associate Professor in the Dept of Theatre Arts and Dance and Director of Dance in the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She is also the Artistic Director of Ananya Dance Theatre, a dance company of women artists of colour who believe in the powerful intersection of artistic excellence and social justice.

Her book, Butting out! Reading cultural politics in the work of Chandralekha and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2004. Dr Chatterjea’s residency will focus on the development of a new book, The Tyranny of the Pointed Foot, on contemporary dance out of Africa, Asia, and its diasporas.

Chanzo Greenidge, Meida McNeal and Nicole Castor (Trinidad/USA) are developing

Consuming Blackness Diasporically - a transnational performance ethnography project and digital diasporic cultural archive. Their residency will focus on meeting with local cultural artists, critics, theorists and educators to dialogue about the best practices and use for a living digital cultural archive that documents local cultural forms - i.e., Trinidadian folk performance, Brazilian capoeira, Chicago house music and dance).

Dr Nicole Castor, Texas A&M University, Department of Anthropology/Africana Studies Program, Dr Chanzo Greenidge, Independent Scholar/Bravo Language Service, and Dr. Meida McNeal, Independent Scholar-Artist/Chicago Artists Resource Web Project Dance Researcher, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs / Teaching Artist, Changing Worlds. With Session I

Artist-in-Residence, Celia Weiss Bambara, McNeal recently developed the Forum for Culture, Meaning & Movement Research, which exists to generate dialogue around central issues in the practice, research and making of dance, focusing in particular on performance reflecting Afro-diasporic perspectives.

Michelle Isava (Trinidad/Venezuela) is a Trinidad-based performance artist who received a BA in Visual Arts from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 2009. Past performances have included Girl in Box= Discomfort + Speed at Alice Yard (2007), Womantra, a performance about the links between language and the female sex, and Silent Silhouettes, an art installation that dealt with violence against women.

Tania Isaac (St Lucia/USA) Artistic Director of Tania Isaac Dance, a physically explosive, sensual marriage of modern and Caribbean esthetics: part personal documentary and part social commentary. Contemporary dance with a raga-soca blend of movement ideas, words, and images, the work swings between irreverence and celebration, sensual athleticism and pure emotion, creating a cultural bridge from the dance and music of the eastern Caribbean to contemporary art as a catalyst for civic dialogue.

Isaac’s residency will focus on the development of a new dance theatre work.

Makeda Thomas founded her New York-based Roots and Wings Movement! in 2003. The company has presented dance works for the stage as well as multimedia projects for dance theatre experimentation throughout the United States, in South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago. Thomas holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Hollins University.

For more information on the 2010 Dance and Performance Institute, visit www.makedathomas.org.