Current Projects

Ivory and Gold: a Dance for Film

My maternal great grandparents were known as Ivory and Gold. I dedicate this project to them. As a descendant of African slaves in America, much of my family history is unknown. I come from a people who were stripped of their identity and heritage, separated, sold, renamed, brainwashed and forced to assimilate to their own oppression. So just knowing the names of my mother’s grandfather, Ivory, and her grandmother, Golina, is a privilege. I am honored to make Ivory and Gold: a Dance for Film, the namesake of my earliest known ancestors, who lived and died in Mississippi. For many Black Chicagoans, our known history begins with the Great Migration across the Mississippi River. We haven’t been able to retain or receive any historical record of our family’s journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Ivory and Gold: a Dance for Film is an ode to what was lost and an exploration of what was preserved through epic memory.

During my rehearsal process with my seven Black dancers, we became a family of our own. We shared stories of where and who we came from and created a sacred community, where we were free to explore our identities in ways we hadn’t been given space to do so before. We welcomed our ancestors into the practice rooms and into our bodies, our vessels. We explored what it meant to be Black dancers. We took our time to delve into the politics of the movement of Black bodies and what it means to infiltrate spaces where we have historically been locked out and looked down upon. We reclaimed our right to be here, and to just be. A major component of our rehearsal process has been an attempt to contextualize the continuity of movement from Africa to America. All we all know for certain is that there is a lot which we do not know for certain. This is an exploration of areas and eras. We have been working together to explore nationality and intersectionality through movement and to highlight the malleability of the Black identity by using dance as a vehicle of historical memory and storytelling.