New Waves! 2024
BIM
26 JULY - 1 AUGUST
LET'S DANCE!
IN HONOR OF THE LATE JOHN MICHAEL GORING.
BARBADOS.
NEW WAVES! INSTITUTE. A gathering of dance artists, scholars, teachers, students, and leaders in the field of dance who embody the depth and spirit of contemporary dance and performance practice in the Caribbean and its Diasporas. In an organizing principle of ‘Emancipation’, New Waves! participants connect in essential ways that alters and brings out light in one another. Join us! Let's Dance!
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IN HONOR OF JOHN MICHAEL GORING
In Benefit to the John Michael Goring Memorial Committee
John Michael Goring (b. 21 July 1952 in Bridgetown Barbados) was a member of the Barbados National Dance Theatre. At 23, he moved to Washington DC to earn his BFA at Howard University where he was taken under the tutelage of Louis Johnson and became a member of Capital Ballet. Goring toured throughout Europe with multiple international artists, dance reviews, dance companies and theatrical shows. In NYC, Goring danced with Al Peryman's Dance Theatre and the Eleo Pomare Dance Company. In 1983, Goring retired from performing and began a career as a dance teacher at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York. Goring taught at Dewey for the next 27 years and was known for his love of dance, discipline and his elaborate-multi faceted dance concerts. Throughout his teaching career he taught an estimated 400 students a year and directed the elite Dewey Dance Ensemble. Many of his students - including Institute Director, Makeda Thomas - went on to colleges and universities, performed with dance companies all over the world, appeared on Broadway, became well-known choreographers, founded dance companies, are mothers and fathers, educators and ambassadors of Goring's teachings.
New Waves! has become a rite of passage for dancers of the Caribbean and its Diasporas, having engaged hundreds of dance and performance artists, scholars, teachers, researchers and students in Trinidad & Tobago, Haiti, and New York. Placed within the multiplicity of the Caribbean historical and cultural context, in an organizing principle of ‘Emancipation’, the Institute is a site of creativity, experimentation, and critical thought about dance, performance and community making in the Caribbean. Let's Dance!
"This revolution of Emancipation, the revolution of Independence...that did not happen, it is still to happen." - Tony Hall, New Waves! Founding Faculty
NEWS/PRESS
"I can articulate these connections now, but it would not be until I visited Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to attend the New Waves! Dance and Performance Institute in 2018 that I would witness God’s queerness so fluidly across sites of religious ecstasy and hedonistic abandon. It was during that trip that I realized I could take queerness and my God (in all their forms) with me, wherever I go, without shame or consequence. I’d come to the institute in 2018 intending to observe — a collaborator of mine, a choreographer, was there participating in daily movement workshops - "... but my plans to be a passive gawker were immediately thwarted: I was told that observation without participation was not permitted, and deeply “colonial.” The New Waves! founder, Makeda Thomas, has been facilitating the Institute for several years and the space — exclusively dedicated to African and Caribbean futurisms, ancestral spirituality, embodied practices, and most importantly, Black liberation — required collective fellowship in corporeal movement as a central part of its practice and operation."
