Great Minds Think Alike

After many years of offering scholarships to dancers of color to study Aerial Dance with us at Fly-by-Night, I was approached by a recipient, Ashley Brown, who told me she was interested in working on a trapeze solo and wondered if I might advise her. Well, Ashley happens to be a powerful artist on her own and it just so happened that I had been pondering a work similar to the one she described for quite some time. So, I mentioned that we might try collaborating.

After a few meetings about how our collaboration might play out, we found ourselves in the studio improvising, then reflecting, then improvising some more.

In a photo session this week with Martha Granger Photography an image captured some of what we have been exploring.

Photo Martha Granger Photography

We will continue this work combining breath, text, voice, and aerial and floor dancing to explore the question of how exposure to violence effects society and individuals and as well as how the use of the breath has been employed to combat these effects throughout history by using the movement of air within and without the body as a visceral path to celebrations of the flesh.

Along the way we plan to employ historical uses of the breath from a variety of sources including somatics (meditative breathing), Pentacostal services (whooping, hollering, speaking in tongues), etc. as we dig into the idea,

“How does breath practice influence our social and political selves?”

So we are on our way to a new work!
Stay tuned for a works-in-progress studio showing the last weekend of April.
You can make a contribution to this work HERE