About
Image credit: Andy Mogg
MoAD hosts the Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now
Celebrating 20 years of Black Arts & Culture
Spirit of Sankofa: Bridging the Legacy of Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century (BCM) & Black Choreographers Festival (BCF)
Artist Panel - Joanna Haigood (BCM & BCF), Robert Moses (BCM & BCF), Raissa Simpson (BCF),Dazaun Soleyn (BCF)
Moderated by Dr. Halifu Osumare
The "Throwback to the Future" panel explores the Sankofa Process by invoking memory to understand the present and future possibilities of Black dance makers in the Bay Area. "Sankofa," in the Ghanaian Twi language, means to "Go Back and Get It," or the path to self-knowledge is to understand how the past figures into the present and an empowered future. Two generations of Black Choreographers dialogue about how the issues during the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century (BCM) a national dance initiative (1989-1995) have shifted, yet remain the same today, during the 20th anniversary of Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now (BCF). Join us for a stimulating discussion about what it means to be Black in the Bay Area dance scene Then and Now.
Attend this panel at MoAD and receive a special discount code to see the upcoming BCF: Here & Now performances at Dance Mission Theater.
Go to bcfhereandnow.com for BCF performance info!
Please consider joining us on Saturday, February 8, 2025 for free performances of Healing Intimacy, an immersive piece by Dazaun Soleyn and Algin Sterling that activates MoAD's galleries in response to the current exhibition, Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors & Radical Black Joy. Performances will take place at 12pm, 2pm, and 4pm.
About the Speakers:
Joanna Haigood (BCM & BCF) (@joannahaigood)
Since 1980 Joanna has been creating work that uses natural, architectural and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d'Avignon. She has also been honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the United States Artist Fellowship, and a New York Bessie Award. Haigood is also a recipient of the esteemed Doris Duke Artist Award and she is a Dance Magazine Awardee ’24. https://zaccho.org/?collaborators
Robert Moses (BCM & BCF) (@robertmoseskin)
Choreographer, Writer, and Composer Robert Moses has created over 100 works of varying styles and genres for his highly praised dance company Robert Moses’ Kin (founded in 1995), and has composed many of the sound and narrative scores for his works since 2008. Moses has choreographed for dance, opera, and theater companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, San Francisco Opera, Olympic Arts Festival, Ailey II, Philadanco, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, African Cultural Exchange (UK), Bare Bones (UK), Oakland Ballet, among others. He has taught on college campuses throughout the US, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, Cal State Long Beach, Mills College, Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Moses’ work explores topics ranging from oral traditions in African American culture, contemporary urban culture, and the complexities of identity, to the simple joys and expressive power of pure movement. https://www.robertmoseskin.org/robert-moses
Raissa Simpson (BCF) (@pushdance)
Raissa Simpson is a scholar and a post-disciplinary artist whose award-winning choreography is at the intersection of racial and cultural identities and centers around discourse on the complex experiences of racialized bodies. She holds mixed heritage by way of African-descended sharecroppers from Mississippi and as a daughter of an immigrant from the Philippines. She founded PUSH to examine the body as a site for racial discourse and since then has toured and performed in over 50 venues. Raissa Simpson (she/her) is a scholar and an post-disciplinary artist whose award-winning choreography is at the intersection of racial and cultural identities and centers around discourse on the complex experiences of racialized bodies. She holds mixed heritage by way of African-descended sharecroppers from Mississippi and as a daughter of an immigrant from the Philippines. She founded PUSH to examine the body as a site for racial discourse and since then has toured and performed in over 50 venues. Raissa is currently a Core Lecturer at Stanford University and in 2008, she founded a school, PUSH Conservatory. Raissa makes performances that are about personal stories that oftentimes remain unseen or unheard. These stories are lived experiences, oral histories, how we navigate this world and more. https://www.pushdance.org/raissa/
Dazaun Soleyn (BCF) (@dazaun_s)
With an intention to create art that aims to illuminate the human soul, Dazaun Soleyn (he/she/they), has presented work in the Bay Area since 2013. He received a BFA in Modern Dance Performance and Choreography from the University of South Florida and continued his dance education at the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program. Recently, Dazaun graduated from California College of the Arts with a Masters in Architecture (MArch). Dazaun is an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, a Gyrotonic Instructor, Reiki Master and Apprentice Herbalists. His mediums include dance, architecture, sculpture and interactive installations. https://dazaunsoleyn.org/home
Dr. Halifu Osumare (@hosumare)
Dr. Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita in the Department of African American and African Studies (AAS) at University of California, Davis, and was the Director of AAS 2011-2014. She has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over fifty years. With a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and an MA in Dance Ethnology from S.F. State University, she is also a protégé of the late renowned dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham and a Certified Instructor of Dunham Dance Technique. Dr. Osumare founded Everybody’s Creative Arts Center in Oakland in 1977 and helped to establish California’s multicultural arts movement. Between 1989-1995 she was the Founder and Executive Producer of her national dance initiative Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. As an artist-scholar, Dr. Osumare has performed, taught, and conducted research not only in the U.S., but also in the African countries of Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya, and recently in Brazil. Her dancing, teaching and writing spans the traditional African to the contemporary African American. Like her mentor Katherine Dunham, Dr. Osumare has dedicated her life to the intersections of the arts and humanities for a better world. https://www.hosumare.com/about
BCF’s 20th Anniversary made possible through the support of SFAC’s Dream Keeper Initiative, SFAC CEI, Zellerbach Family Foundation; community partners: MoAD, SFPL, MSP Galleries, Dance Mission Theater, SADC. Presented & Curated by AAAPAC and K*Star*Productions.
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