community in motion

Urban Bush Women dancers and BOLD facilitators will be in residency at Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation to explore community with female artists while working with community partner organizations.

The residency will culminate with a free to the public performance/workshop mashup featuring Urban Bush Women dance/facilitators’ Jaimé Yawa Dzandu, Kentoria Earle, Love Muwwakkill, and Mikaila Ware as they perform an excerpt from Haint Blu followed by a Collab Lab and special Dance for Every Body Workshop.

Haint Blu is an ensemble dance-theater work seeped in memory and magic. Known as the color that Southern families paint their front porches to ward off bad spirits, Haint Blu uses performance as a center and source of healing, taking us through movement into stillness and rest: remembering, reclaiming, releasing, and restoring. It is an embodied look into familial lines and the movements, histories and stories of our elders and ancestors. It reflects on what has been lost across generations and what can be recovered. Haint Blu takes us to the magical place where spirits share their legacies journey onward, and leave the thick residue of their knowing behind.

DANCE FOR EVERYBODY WORKSHOP

Let’s move! No dance experience is necessary!

This movement jam/dance class embraces the ideas that each individual has a unique and powerful contribution to make, and that our bodies are a powerful source of agency. The goal is for “every body” to find their level of challenge and comfort and partake according to their abilities, and to appreciate the groups’ diversity as an attribute to their community. This is a movement class designed for the community so no prior dance experience is needed. Participants explore UBW’s technique with close attention to the use of breath, weight, call and response and polyrhythms. 

FACILITATOR