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UPCOMING EVENTS!

Kshoy!/Decay Workshop & PERFORMANCE with Ananya Dance Theatre
Kshoy!/Decay looks at violence against global communities of women of color through the paradigms of mud (land), gold, oil, and water. Monday, 26 July at 1pm. The Dance Studio at the Academy for the Performing Arts. 

Weaving through movement and words, we will create a story circle. In this circle, we will work collectively to invoke histories, some untold and some told, and imagine a narrative of how violence figures in our lives. One of the main goals of this workshop is to name as violent the experiences that are violent but pass as part of life activities because we have come to accept them as such. Another goal is to recognize, through movement, the multiple impacts of such silencings, oppressions, that we have come to name as violence.  120 minutes.

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Contemporary Indian Dance: Exploring a Feminine, Feminist Vocabulary
Master class with Ananya Chatterjea.  Monday, 26 July at 11am. The Dance Studio at the Academy for the Performing Arts.   

This is a relatively advanced level technique class based on the Odissi classical style of Indian dance, the martial movement form Chhau, and Iyengar style yoga. These forms are deconstructed and then extended to create a contemporary South Asian movement/dance form.  We will focus on the exploration of several principles:  Articulation of the spine, Footwork and rhythmic floor patterns, Hip flexion and torso movement, Breath work.  Please arrive dressed in fitting clothes, preferably shorts, so I can see your knees. We will dance barefeet, and shoes will not be allowed in class. I will touch students and work with them closely on issues of alignment.  90 minutes.

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Interrogating Diaspora: Issues in Geopolitics, Connection and Dissonance Online

Thursday, July 22 @ 5:30 pm - CBD Public Dialogue at Studio 66

How does diaspora become an active process? How can diaspora create interaction, conflict, dialogue and community by sharing different local stories of identity, culture, and knowledge? What does Africa have to do with all this?

We imagine diaspora as generative and interactive conceptual space rather than just as a location of displacement, violence, and loss. CBD allows new levels of access to the scholar’s work at every stage of the research process – notes, evidence/data collection, argument/analysis – extending a dialogic hand to knowledgeable research subjects who can act as co-theorists by speaking back, interacting, and offering their own interpretations or critiques.

Consuming Blackness Diasporically: A Transnational Performance Ethnography Project and Diasporic Culture Archive.  A multi-sited and virtually mediated collaborative ethnography project bringing together academic scholars and local practitioners to document, archive and analyze African diasporic expressive traditions.

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Talk with Trinidad's independent contemporary choreographers
Thursday, 22 July

Makeda Thomas

Dave Williams

Sonja Dumas

Artist Talk featuring Makeda Thomas, Dave Williams, and Sonja Dumas.  The artists talk about their work and processes. With collaborators, video, and sharing of notes.  Light refreshments will be served.

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Talk with Dr. Ananya Chatterjea
Wednesday, 21 July at 7pm at Studio 66

History of Odissi: Reconstruction of a Tradition is a talk about the way in which Odissi, one of the oldest classical dance forms in India, existed in its origins, and how it came to slowly degenerate due to certain religious injunctions and particularly during British colonial rule due to lack of support and resources. I will also share how the process of reconstruction happened in the 1960's and ask at what cost this reconstruction as a proscenium stage form happened. I will work through a power point of images and videos. I am hopeful that this talk will open up questions of what we, as decolonized peoples, have to do in order to revive our histories. Must we submit to Europeanist ideas and write down all historical narratives? or can we find other ways for our histories to exist and still be safe?

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Consuming Ourselves: Exploring Contemporary Ethnographic Methods & Ethics

Tuesday, July 20 @ 7pm - CBD Public Dialogue at Studio 66

What are our stories? What are the stories that we inherit and build on? How do we tell our stories? How do we keep those stories and pass them on? Who has the right to tell our stories? How do we build a shared archive?

Contemporary ethnography is defined by cultures lived, and stories shared, across multiple worlds. Ideas and artifacts circulate both locally and globally. Increasingly, people define themselves not just as national identities but also as hybrid, cosmopolitan, transnational, diasporic citizens. In this post-colonial moment, the balance of power and authority to represent is often contested. Through CBD, we interrogate the ways ethnography is employed and deployed. With this project we conceptualize a community of users contributing to, dialoguing about, and debating the relationships between culture, performance, identity and belonging in diaspora.

Consuming Blackness Diasporically: A Transnational Performance Ethnography Project and Diasporic Culture Archive.  A multi-sited and virtually mediated collaborative ethnography project bringing together academic scholars and local practitioners to document, archive and analyze African diasporic expressive traditions.

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Salon #2:  Trinidad Masculinities and Femininities with Dr. Gabrielle Hosein
Tuesday, 20 July at 7:30pm. 

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"PaperChase" Community Workshop with Chevon Stewart
PaperChase examines the history of Chinese migratory struggles and those contributions to Caribbean culture.  Friday, 16 July from 5:30 - 7:30pm at Cascade Studio. 

We will build the foundation to share the often unheard voice of the history of Chinese migratory struggles and discover those contributions to the Caribbean culture. By delving into the history of slaves and immigrants from both China and Africa, we will explore how both cultures shape Caribbean identity today. To gain as broad a perspective of the Chinese experience in the Caribbean, we will look at it across different countries - Trinidad, Jamaica and Cuba. This workshop will ask, Who are we? What do we value? How do we connect or disconnect from each other? I want to conduct personal interviews with several people (of different generations) of mixed Asian and African heritage. Hopefully I will meet some of these people through the workshop.

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MARCH 2010

A new site-specific work-in-progress by Celia Weiss Bambara
25 March at 8pm
at Alice Yard - 80 Roberts Street, Port of Spain

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Dancemaking/Choreography
18- 20 March for Tobago Division of Culture
Monday, 22 March at University of the West Indies, Centre for Creative & Festival Arts

Dr. Celia Weiss Bambara, Artist in Residence, will offer a workshop in dancemaking that will engage participants in an African based contemporary warm-up and technique. The three-hour workshop will explore a few choreographic devices that critically inquire the base of a diasporic form, rhythm, or memory. Participants will work on guided improvisations, creating movement from a specific rhythm, ways to workshop memory and collaborative phrase making.  Participants should come prepared to move, create and explore.

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Talk with Robert Young of THE CLOTH, Race, Identity & Being Here
Wednesday, 17 March

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FEBRUARY 2010


Workshops taught by guest artists, performance studies, and informal dialogues run alongside Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival (15 & 16 February 2010) which embodies the artistry, spirit and energy of this residency.  Positions Carnival at the centre of performance studies and seeks to engage the local and international community in study and conversation around:

Myth, Mas & Movement  Makeda Thomas/Roots & Wings Movement!
Performance Study:  Kalinda/Stickfight Competition  Wednesday, 3 February at 6PM
Viey La Cou: Exploration of Traditional Carnival Characters  Sunday, 7 February at 12PM
Performance Study:  Re-Enactment of the Canboulay Riots  Friday, 12 February at 5AM
Women & Resistance in Canboulay  Attillah Springer/IDAKEDA  Saturday, 13 February at 3PM
Performance Study:  Jouvay  Sunday, 14 February at 2AM
Performance Study:  Blue Devils of Paramin  Monday, 15 February at 1PM
Performance Study:  Carnival Tuesday Mas  Tuesday, 16 February

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JANUARY 2010

Open House
Friday, 29 January from 5-6pm
at The Republic of Sydenham, Port of Spain

Artist in Residence, Brittany Williams, rehearses a new solo work tentatively titled, "We were born to Suffer, Hung before Birth, Poverty has taught me otherwise" and invites those interested to observe the creation of the work in progress. Light refreshments will be served.

"This choreography surrounds lynching in the modern day context - the education system, government, political lynching, racism, the lynching of art and culture. This piece is about my personal struggle and pain to get out of a society that accepts poverty, failure and destruction freely."

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Modern Dance Class with Metamorphosis Dance Company
Saturday, 23 January from 2pm - 3:15pm



Artist in Residence, Brittany Williams teaches a technique class in Modern Dance at the Caribbean School of Dancing in Port of Spain. Learn more about Metamorphosis here.

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Dinner at The Republic
Sunday, 17 January at 6PM
at The Republic of Sydenham, Port of Spain

Meet 2010 Dance & Performance Institute Artists in Residence.  Food and drinks served.

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Project: "Moko"
by Tasha Connolly
Thursday, 14 January 2010

The Moko arrived in Trinidad by “walking all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from the West coast of Africa, laden with many, many centuries of experience, and, in spite of all inhuman attacks and encounters, yet still walks tall, tall, tall." (John Cupid, Caribbean Beat)  Artist in Residence, Tasha Connolly begins a weblog on her research on the moko jumbie tradition.  In 2007, Tasha began apprenticing with Dragon de Souza at Keylemanjahro School of Arts & Culture in Cocorite, Trinidad. Join Tasha as she shares her continued study and research of the moko jumbie dance. http://mokoinfo.blogspot.com

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Talk with Burton Sankeralli, author of Of Obeah and Modernity
Monday, 11 January 2010 at 7pm
at The Republic of Sydenham, Port of Spain

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Performance: "Kenbe, Amour, Colére, Folie: Improvisations for Love"
by Celia Weiss Bambara
Saturday, 9 January 2010 at 9pm
at The Republic of Sydenham, Port of Spain

Inter-culturalism is a fraught space in which the micro-cosm of a romantic relationship enacts the very questions of our times. Who are we allowed to love? How do we reconcile our differences? Who decides which bodies can love? Who decides which bodies can speak differently about love?   Drawing upon Haitian novelist, Marie Chauvet’s once-banned novel, Amour,  Colére, Folie to express the ways in which the anxiety of political and  economic unrest are navigated by different female voices, this work  strives to express how one can hold on tight, to hopes, dreams and liberty as well as love across cultures.

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Salon #1: Pedagogy
Thursday, 7 January 2010 at 7pm
at The Republic of Sydenham, Port of Spain

With Makeda Thomas, Artists in Residence, Sonja Dumas (Artistic Director and Choreographer of CONTINUUM), Nicole Wesley (Associate Professor, Academy for the Performing Arts, The University of Trinidad & Tobago), and Attillah Springer (IDAKEDA)