Taking Root to Fly: An Exploration Into Identity Through Movement

Taking Root to Fly: An Exploration Into Identity Through Movement
April 20, 2024 | 2 p.m.
Marketview Arts, Gallery Hall

Not unlike community-based artists before us like Urban Bush Women, Anne Bogart, and Liz Lerman, we are planning a day that will bring movement arts mixed with visual elements to the local community. Rather than offering solutions to the multitude of social problems, the structures and the choreography reflect the ambiguity and complexity of the situations and the process through which performers and audience members must travel (George-Graves, 2010, p. 107).*

This event will be the start of a cultural series at Marketview Arts in 2024 addressing issues of identity. This movement-based work will bring our community an opportunity to view, partake, and ask questions about the experience. A central goal of the York College Center for Community Engagement and Marketview is to bring our community together and provide a safe space for complicated conversations.

“Taking Root to Fly,” came about after Marketview Artist-in-Residence Jeannine Dabb, who is currently working on her MFA, envisioned an opportunity to create a safe space of social healing conversations through movement, with the help of three dancer/choreographer classmates also in her MFA program at Wilson College. These three movement artists will be presenting a 90-minute interactive performance/workshop, including an improv exercise, exploration of the stalking/mirror technique, and call and response and how it connects to the community. The performance/workshop will be followed by a question and answer session.

The artists will also be doing impromptu, flash mob-style, pop-up teasers in downtown York the morning of the event to generate interest and excitement.

Image Credit: Paintings by Jeannine Dabb

*George-Graves, N. (2010). Urban bush women: Twenty Years of african american dance theater, community engagement, and working it out. University of Wisconsin Press.

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Amanda Chestnut
Chestnut has a BA in Dance and Religious Studies from Randolph College and is pursuing her MFA in Choreography at Wilson College. She also teaches dance at Dickinson College and Bloom Dance Studio. Her work exists at the intersection of dance and religion; exploring research-based historical perspectives on religious dance, particularly centered around the Abrahamic traditions. Currently, she is focusing on retelling the stories of Old Testament Women who have been unfairly villainized throughout history (such as Bathsheba) and through extensive research, using dance to accurately reclaim their stories.

Candis Gamble
Gamble has a BA in Dance Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Choreography at Wilson College. She also teaches dance at Suitland High School. In her work, Gamble tells stories of the women in her family through movement. Most of the women had tragic and sorrowful stories, so she wants to give them a voice of empowerment through the choreography in this work. This project aspires for audience members to understand the importance of a sense of Community, family, and the healing necessary within the Black Community.

Angelina Ponzio Labate
Labate is a choreographer, dancer, poet, storyteller, and documentarian whose work is guided by Afrodiasporic traditions of Hip Hop, Street and Club Dance. She has a BA from UCLA and is currently pursuing a Street Dance Teaching Certificate with Rennie Harris University and an MFA in Choreography with Wilson College. Through stories of her own life as a 3rd generation Italian American, Labate investigates Americanization, assimilation, race, and ethnicity. She is interested in riveting, honest stories of lineage, identity and relationships. Her work celebrates tradition while seeking evolution, and it is rooted in sincerity, questioning, healing and change.