Help us travel to Richmond to perform for PRIDE!

Friends! I have been invited to Richmond, VA, to present a new choreographic work at the Mid Atlantic Choreographers Showcase this June, and I need your help to get there! In its 18th year, the showcase curated by Starr Foster Dance features performance works by six different choreographers. This year’s showcase is explicitly dedicated to celebrating work that grapples with gender, sexuality, and LGBTQIA+ themes. For the occasion, I am developing a new work entitled Fools + Kings that explores themes of heartbreak and connection through the lens of Black Queer Aesthetics and Embodiment.

 

Where you come in:

 

I need your help to raise $3000 to help offset the cost of travel and lodging for myself and my brilliant artistic collaborators, Lee Edwards and Kahlila Brown . We will make a road trip from Durham, NC, to Richmond, VA, and stay in an Airbnb near the theater for three rehearsal and performance days!

 

Why now / Why this is important:

 

Y'all, I can't overstate how excited I am about this opportunity and how important it is in this stage of my dance/choreographic career. For starters, this is my first official opportunity to take a piece I have choreographed on the road. Secondly, this is our first opportunity to perform for a live audience in a fully produced show since early 2020 due to the pandemic. Furthermore, the explicit mission of this showcase to celebrate the art and lives of the LGBTQ+ community make this a perfect forum in which to share my artistic practice, which experiments with Black feminist methodologies and Queer performance to expand the possibilities of western concert dance. You can learn more about my recent creative work here and here!

 

Want to know more? Read on to learn about the inspiration for Fools + Kings:

 

Fools + Kings blends the technique, tools, and technologies of ballet, modern and post-modern dance with Black vernacular dance styles, and improvisation to share stories about Black Queer experience. Intersectionality and a “quare” sensibility that reflects a racialized sexual and gender identity are consistent themes in my movement practice and performance work.

 

Set to a compilation of Nat King Cole ballads, Fools + Kings also takes inspiration from the life and art of Black, queer musician and composer Billy Strayhorn . Strayhorn was a prodigious classical pianist whose contributions to the musical canon were overshadowed by his extremely close working relationships with artists like Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington. Strayhorn was responsible for composing, arranging, and writing the lyrics to many of Cole’s and Ellington’s biggest hits, including Lush Life and Take the “A” Train. Throughout his prolific career, Strayhorn would revolutionize American music and create a new sound that blended the style and sensibilities of jazz with the arrangements and signatures of classical music.

 

The fusion of disparate elements and styles seen in Strayhorn’s music mirrors the hybrid quality of my movement practice and the choreographic aesthetic demonstrated in Fools + Kings.