Month: July 2018

East Durham Children’s Initiative

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Jody Cassell and I are super excited to be bringing our dancing stories to this wonderful program in the Fall of 2018. East Durham Children’s Initiative (EDCI) is a community-targeted educational initiative with the vision that all the children in a 120 block area of East Durham will graduate from high school. This is grassroots activism at its best! Now, thanks to American Dance Festival (ADF) and a grant from the Ivy Community Service Foundation of Cary, Inc we get to offer our skills to this amazing community.

For the last 5 years, Jody and I have been part of the ADF Community Outreach. We take our programs of interactive creative dance and storytelling to libraries, YMCAs, schools, and museums to promote dance as a joyful, imaginative and expansive activity for children. Jody teaches creative dance classes for “little ones” and their care providers as well as classes for children age 4-9 at ADF Studios. So our community workshops help spread the word about those classes and about the overall ADF season which peaks in Durham every summer. Last summer, ADF sent us for a workshop with the EDCI Stepping Stones summer program at the Maureen Joy Charter School. A preschool group of about a dozen with a lead teacher and several aides moved with us through BrainDance(c) and Jody’s story Where’s Leon?. We had such a great time with them! We really wanted to go back. Then ADF staff obtained a grant that allows for three more dancing story performances and two professional development sessions for teachers at EDCI in November/December 2018!

As I read through their Six Year Impact Study, it was clear that our dancing story programs are designed to fulfill aspects of EDCI’s mission. EDCI emphasizes early childhood intervention as a path to greater success in grade school and beyond. Jody Cassell trained as a Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts teaching artist and served as a Master Artist for over a decade. She has honed her skills in community-based dance and story in Atlanta and Baltimore school systems, and special residencies in school systems throughout NC. Her programs are designed to promote brain development and physical coordination, improve focus, engage somatic learning, and foster creative expression. The soundscapes for Jody’s stories center around pulses from brain wave states, which sonically enhance relaxation and focused engagement during dancing stories. The most important element in all is that we have fun!

Durham is such a rich place to live with so many wonderful and terrible things happening all at once. It is a joy to be engaged with locally focused organizations that are planting the seeds of creativity, respect and a high regard for the wide variety of learning styles that exist in the world.

I am grateful to have found myself at this particular intersection!

If, like me, you did not know about EDCI and the important service they provide, please check out their 6 year impact study: http://edci.org/en/about/impact

In the Company of Jupiter

In one week, Company Dance will be presenting SHOW, a five night art installation/soundscape/video/dance work with dozens of collaborators at The Fruit in Durham. Last summer, Company performed Modulations, a work that played with place and perception. The dancers, audience and accompaniests were in different locations connected by an audio-video feed. The dance was projected on the outside of the 21c Hotel and via live feed. The last night had everyone together in the 21c Ballroom. The dancers of Company performed under all of these circumstances with a different soundscape each night. This year, SHOW will play with visibility/invisiblity, illusion, deciding when to be seen and when to disappear all while in the midst of creating and recreating sound, movement, visuals. The event will unfold differently each night.

I am excited to be creating soundscapes for Company on three of the five nights. The evening will be in two parts. During the first part, the audience explores active performance sets throughout The Fruit, including the upstairs and the basement. The soundscape for this will be recycled sound from the audience moving around through the space. (Looking forward to looping THAT!) The second part is a newly choreographed work by Justin Tornow’s Company. The soundscape for this will be based on NASA recordings of electromagnetic activity from the planet Jupiter as processed and sonically explored by myself, and musicians Del Ward and John Osburn. I will sound the space Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights, while Del plays on Sunday and John on Thursday night.

Come see or be seen at The Fruit July 11 – 15th at 8 pm.

TICKETS: https://www.artful.ly/store/events/15424