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Gerald Casel / GERALDCASELDANCE

Not About Race Dance

1 hour
Schaeffer Theatre

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This performance contains adult language and discretion is advised for young audience members. 

A Post-Show Discussion will follow the Saturday performance

Long Table Discussion with Gerald Casel

Tues, July 11, 7:30pm
The BDF Tent

A collaborative, choreographic response to the unacknowledged racial politics in U.S. postmodern dance — a form developed in the 1960s whose tropes and aesthetics have endured in the dance field. Despite postmodernism’s popularity, its racial dynamics have gone largely unacknowledged. In Not About Race Dance, Gerald Casel and his collaborators occupy a space that has been historically defined by white artists to present a contrasting vision of where Black and Brown bodies belong.

“Vulnerable, cathartic, clever, and delivered with compelling rigor.” ––  Rachel Howard, The Fjord Review

Gerald Casel’s choreographic research complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. To this end, Casel has led a community engagement program called Dancing Around Race, activating the community through candid discussions around racial equity.

GERALDCASELDANCE is a Bay area based company that creates and presents dances that ask questions about human beings – who they are, what they do and how their actions affect the world in which they live. Each dance provokes reflection and implants its imagery into the viewer’s psyche by combining movement and spatial composition with metaphor. Dropping hints of narrative while inviting space for contemplation, the dances deliver multiple levels of interpretation and meaning. 

The company’s creative process strives for inventing new movements and structures that seek explanations to what humans fear, love and hate. GERALDCASELDANCE supports collaboration between dance, sound design, and emerging technology – mixing performance with recorded and live video projections to enhance the experience of seeing and feeling dance.

More information: geraldcasel.com

Not About Race Dance
Concept and Direction: Gerald Casel
Movement Collaborators: Styles Alexander, Audrey Johnson, Karla Quintero, and Cauveri Suresh
Live Sound Design: Tim Russell
Lighting and Media Design: Aron Altmark
Dramaturgy: Rebecca Chaleff
Text: “Coyotes” by Styles Alexander
Script: “La revancha” by Karla Quintero
Costume Consultant: Pamela Rodriguez-Montero

The development of Not About Race Dance was supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, UCSC Arts Research Institute, the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, and The Bogliasco Foundation.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Photo by Robbie Sweeney

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