2019 Spring Studio Dance Series @ Harper Joy Theatre

(Pictured: Hadar Ahuvia, Angie Pittman, Austin & Hankins)

All events are free and open to the public!

Hadar Ahuvia: February 25, 2019 @ 7:30 PM
//Followed by a post-performance discussion moderated by Associate Professor of Anthropology Suzanne Morrissey//
Hadar Ahuvia's "The Dances are For Us" performs an homage to and a break from a legacy of Zionist cultural workers by rearranging beloved Israeli folk songs and dances to face the Nakba. (Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe, refers to the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 as a result of the founding of the state of Israel). The work builds on Ahuvia’s several research on the construction Israeliness in early Israeli folk dances based on appropriated indigenous cultures. While returning to the family history and national mythologies surrounding the Jezreel Valley/ Marj Ibn Amer where her great-grandparents settled and where the folk dances emerged, the work is grounded here in the U.S., where the dances are practiced by folklorists, Zionists, Jews and Christians alike. The work proposes a way of breaking the cycles of transmission, appropriation, and theft- across vast plains of ideological manifestations and technological advancements- that have present-day consequences for Palestinians, Israelis and Americans.
http://hadarahuvia.com/

Angie Pittman: March 5, 2019 @ 7:30 PM
//Followed by a post-performance discussion moderated by Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies Matthew Reynolds//
Angie Pittman's "Sequined Kisses and Vaseline Love" is a diptych that grapples with ways to give love, receive love, be cool, be resilient, achieve survival, and daydream. Sequined Kisses... is an exploration of interiority, and its relationship to compression, love and joy within the context of historical trauma against Black folk. ...Vaseline Love centers “cool” as an African Diasporic concept through greasiness, lubrication, and James Brown cape choreography. Together, these two pieces are a journey towards what Donnell Alexander calls “finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”
https://movementresearch.org/people/angie-pittman


Allie Hankins & Linda Austin: April 15, 2019 @ 7:30 PM
//Followed by a post-performance discussion moderated by Associate Professor of Art M. Acuff//
In "The Traveller and the Thief", Austin and Hankins collapse, expand, and steal time as they travel across landscapes filled with seemingly incongruous concepts, structures, desires, and energies. Inspired by surrealist artists Gertrude Abercrombie and Leonora Carrington, and the “uncanny fictive spaces” in the writing of Jen George, they juxtapose movement, object, words, and song to celebrate (or is it bemoan?) the unstable and precarious grounds of existence.
http://alliehankins.com/pages/actual-news/
https://pwnw-pdx.org/

Coordinated by Renée Archibald, Peter de Grasse, and HJT Dept. Theatre & Dance