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The Work Premieres this Week, March 25-27, 2022
Tell me it still makes sense to create dances in this day and age, because I don’t know anymore. Opening night is one week away. We have to see this through.
Today in rehearsal for Close to You (a duet Big Mike and I created 10 years ago), we found a new moment, a chance to poke fun at the classical pas de deux move where the ballerina is put on balance and her partner steps away leaving her magically en pointe for a second or two — “Look ma no hands”. It’s funny how an old dance continues to reveal itself, getting wiser with age.
I like to think dances and dancers and dance makers can age well.
A dance writer was in the room today and she asked us our names and our age. I realized I could be the grandmother of many of my dancers and collaborators and yet we are occupying the same creative space.
Sometimes I feel like I’m sharing the same brain with collaborator Jasmine Mans, 30-year-old author/spoken word artist, during these precious rehearsal hours. We’re taking care of this work together, Unnatural Surrounding, the unlikely merging of her poem Greenwood and our dance Sonic Relief that crystallized in one hour’s time in the highly pressurized environment of The 1619 Project book launch on the BAM opera house stage, with Hannah Nikole-Jones and Ta-nehisi Coates looking on. It kinda killed, so we have to see this through, expanding the work, punctuating. Composer Malcolm Parson added a piano line that brings us to tears.
How incredibly lucky we are to have this time and purpose and a deadline.
Unnatural Surroundings brings 9 dancers working in the mediums of ballet, modern, street, vogueing and Middle Eastern dance to the same stage from Friday, March 25 until Sunday, March 27 at The Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center, located at 160 Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn.
