Boston Dance Alliance is thrilled to share the news that The Boston Foundation has awarded us a grant of $80,000 to support Dance and Disability: Building the Field which will center the leadership, expertise, and needs of practicing artists with physical disabilities including mobility, vision, and hearing impairments.
This initiative is designed to support the development of personal networks and collective synergies, identify needed resources that do and do not currently exist, and establish paths forward for New England artists working in this important idiom. The majority of this grant will compensate the artists for their participation in a series of virtual conversations and activities beginning later this summer.
If you are a New England dancer with a physical disability and want to be a part of this initiative, contact dcash@bostondancealliance.org
Today, Monday June 22, at 11 a.m. Full Radius Dance, based in Atlanta, is offering an online, physically-integrated class. Contact douglas@fullradiusdance.org to get the link and to get on their list for more online classes when they resume in August
Happy Pride Month!
Peter DiMuro/Public Displays of Motion has extended its deadline for LGBTQ+ creative and performance professionals to be part of Stones to Rainbows/Gay to Queer Lives: Duet Dialogues until June 30. Peter is also looking for people from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis – however you want to understand “front lines” – to share a brief story, which will become the basis of a video postcard. Submissions accepted through the end of August.
A great modern dance work about social isolation, Anna Sokolow’s 1955 Rooms has distinctly contemporary resonance now. The Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble premiers Rooms 2020 on Thursday, June 25 @7pm with a talkback after the screening.
Yes, I am saying I measure my success as a mother of black boys in part by the fact that I have sons who love to dance, who dance in community, who dance till their powerful bodies sweat, who dance and laugh, who dance and shout. Who are able––in the midst of their studying and organizing, their fear, their rage, their protesting, their vulnerability, their missteps and triumphs, their knowledge that they must fight the hydra-headed monster of racism and racial violence that we were not able to cauterize––to find the joy and the power of communal self-expression.
Elizabeth Alexander, The New Yorker
Created during the 1918, pandemic, which affected 500 million people — one-third of the world’s population – the Ojibwa jingle dance has been repurposed to bring healing in the face of both Covid-19 and racist police brutality. These indigenous dancers perform at the site in Minnesota that has become “sacred ground” memorializing George Floyd.