Newsletter #3
July 16, 2018
Dance Friends, Old and New
Dance, the most embodied of the arts-uniting body and mind, cognition and emotion-has been an important part of Performing the World since its founding in 2001. Dancers in recent years have been playing an increasing leadership role in the growing movement of performance activism around the world. Here are a few of the dance activists, some returning and some new to PTW, presenting at Performing the World 2018.
Carolyn Dorfman, the founder and artistic director of Carolyn Dorfman Dance (CDD), is returning to PTW for the third time. She and her eleven-member multi-ethic company will lead a creative/performance experience designed to inspire awareness, break down barriers and create dialogue that speak to the human story, social action and social change. The participatory session is based on Dorfman’s dance, TIKKUN (Hebrew for “to repair”) and invites participants to explore, primarily through movement, their own concepts of “Tikkun,” where they see the world today and their vision for the future.
Sandra Paola Lopez Ramirez is a dancer and activist originally from Bogota, Colombia now living in El Paso, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexican border. This will be her fourth PTW and she’s bringing to PTW 2018 transfronteriza, a collectively created dance that involved over 200 people in the cities of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua. The images, sounds and movements were created with people as young as 7 and as old as 70 in spaces as varied as university classrooms, museums, women’s shelters, street art festivals, community centers and public libraries. transfronteriza is part of a broader project conceived as a women-led cultural organizing effort focused on generating development spaces where women can lead and find ways to share their (or create new) stories.
Attending her third PTW is Mayra Stergiou. This year she’s bringing her dance troupe Vertebra, an international ensemble of European artists who work with diverse communities to devise political performances through a combination of improv, puppetry and film. Vertebra will present their newest piece, At The Heart of Things, a dance performance inspired by Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, and the mass shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida in 2016.
Another dance performance at PTW 2018 will be Reconciliation brought by first-time PTW presenter Marilyn Green, director of Trinity Movement Choir. It was originally choreographed by Green and performed at St. Paul’s Chapel across the street from the former World Trade Center to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the 2001 attack. Many of the original performers had been active in the rescue work. Since then Reconciliation has been performed before thousands around the United States and beyond and taken on a broader meaning as audiences have applied the dance to cataclysmic events in their own countries and lives.