INSIDE DANCE

Our annual musicians concert was back this season. Featuring: Carl Landa, Peter Jones, Terrence Karn, Jesse Manno, Rob Flax and Albert Mathais.

d. Sabela Grimes is a choreographer, writer, composer and educator whose interdisciplinary performance work and pedagogical approach reveal a vested interest in the physical and meta-physical ef-i-kuh-see of Afro-diasporic cultural practices.

Sabela was one of the co-writers of Rome & Jewels with Rennie Harris Puremovement. The interview you are about to hear was recorded in 2013 when we was at the festival teaching at the Young Dancers Workshop.

Moncell Durden is a dance educator, choreographer, ethnographer, embodied historian, author and assistant professor of practice at University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman International School of Dance who specializes in pedagogical practices that prove cultural and historical context in what he calls the morphology of Afro-kinetic memory.

In 2007 the Bates dance festival was having its 25th anniversary. Suzzane Carbonneau facilitated a panel discussion with festival founder Marcie Plavin and Dan Wagoner - the first artist to be presented in the summer of 1983.

The following day Suzanne sat down with Dan Wagoner for a more in depth conversation about his work and ideas as a dance maker.

For this episode we will share excerpts from the artist's talks with David Dorfman and Stephan Batten Bland.

David Dorfman and his collaborators were scheduled to present their work, (A)way out of my body, in 2020. Due to the pandemic now Two years later they were able to bring this work to the festival.

(A)Way Out of My Body uses “out of body” experience as a metaphor for our times and our body politic. DDD’s bodies propel themselves through space and time, attempting to pass the barrier of reality and plight into the realm of positivity and growth.

Stephanie Batten Bland brought her Company SBB with the work: Embarqued: Stories of Soil. Originally this performance was scheduled to be shown outside but due to the high temperatures the show was moved into the Bates College Schaeffer theater.

Embarqued: Stories of Soil is a dance-theatre work centered around a transformative shipmast inviting ˈmīɡrəˌtôrē/ reflections, revealing post-colonial foundations and mythology. Through questioning existing relationships to memorials - they call up all who made our united history, enabling audiences to viscerally and holistically connect our country both forwards and backwards in space and time.

Onye Ozuzu is back this season sharing her ideas and beginnings of her new work - Space Carcasses. Space Carcasses is an interdisciplinary performance that juxtaposes, superimposes, and asserts the body’s relationship to its built environment, particularly spaces that echo with Afrodiasporic forced migrations

This episode features Joanna Kotze a Brooklyn-based, Bessie-award winning dancer, choreographer and teacher. She creates highly physical dance performances through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, presenting ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, materials, light, and space.

This episode features dance and music collaborators who without each other their piece would not exist.

We will begin with the piece, Two, with dancer, Shura Baryshnikov and cellist Adrienne Taylor, long term collaborators, that have drawn upon their creative history together to build a process focused on deep listening, observation, and response.

Next we have the work: IzumonookunI is a dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, Kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of its female-centric, grassroots origins. Choreographer Aretha Aoki and sound and visual designer Ryan MacDonald re-imagine Okuni as a punk rock/sci-fi figure in a landscape of built objects, digital design and live synthesizer. The piece touches on the tensions between erasure and hyper visibility and is an ode to the women in Aoki’s ancestry of whom little is known.

Next we have the work: IzumonookunI is a dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, Kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of its female-centric, grassroots origins. Choreographer Aretha Aoki and sound and visual designer Ryan MacDonald re-imagine Okuni as a punk rock/sci-fi figure in a landscape of built objects, digital design and live synthesizer. The piece touches on the tensions between erasure and hyper visibility and is an ode to the women in Aoki’s ancestry of whom little is known.

Bebe Miller was in attendance as a guest teacher with her long time collaborator Angie Hauser .

In this episode you will hear an interview with Bebe Miller that was conducted in 2013 while she was here at the festival restaging her piece The Hendrix Project with the students as well as presenting her work A History.

Legendary choreographer, Rennie Harris has restaged his classic work, ‘Rome & Jewels' to honour the company's anniversary. 25 years later this critically acclaimed Elizabethan masterpiece, Rome & Jewels is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in the streets of Philadelphia.