During this three-week residency in the Fall, our Artistic Director, Maria Bauman and our Associate Artistic Director, Audrey Hailes, will build with U of M undergraduate dance students through technique classes and choreographic investigation. A performance work will become a part of the 2023/24 University Dance Theatre Repertory.
Photo Credit: Scott Shaw
Past Events
MBDance is proudly offering a mini-festival of participatory workshops, a community meal and a kickoff performance–all centered around trans and queer artists of color past and present. MBDance Artistic Director Maria Bauman mused “I have an undergraduate and a terminal degree in my art field and yet I didn’t learn about queer nor trans artists of color, especially Black folks. We out here, we been here. So, I’ve been grateful to my elders for teaching me our lineage outside of institutions and I’ve been hungrily and happily researching on my own as well. This mini-festival, hopefully a pilot for a longer community course with opportunities for participants to present their own work, is meant to fill in gaps and honor our folks. May we be strengthened by our histories and strengthen our relationships with other QTPOC artists!”
So, please join us for a weekend of participatory workshops to learn about QTPOC artists past and present and to try on their methodologies. We’ll enjoy a kick-off performance by MBDance (ticket included for QTPOC Sankofa Dreaming weekend participants). Cohort participants will also make your own work; offer one another support, critique and encouragement; learn about performative artists you may not have heard of; and enjoy a themed, catered meal together. This is sliding scale/pay-what-you-can, no documentation needed. We’re using the community honor system so please reflect on what’s being offered and what you can afford.
Here’s to celebrating our Queer and Transgender Artmakers of Color! We’re prioritizing QTPOC artists but all are welcome to apply.
Space Details:
QTPOC Sankofa Dreaming takes place at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). We will be in person and masked. A negative covid test is required; thank you.
Accessibility:
BAX is on the second and third floors of the building with stairwells that extend from the ground floor entrance to the building’s third floor. There is no elevator or ramp at this time. BAX is actively working on an extensive accessibility initiative and is committed to implementing ADA-compliant solutions that open the spaces to all.
There will be ASL interpretation at the performance.
Questions or access needs? Email: info@bax.org.
QTPOC Sankofa Dreaming is also supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, Bailey’s Cafe, Dance NYC and the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative 2.0.
Bauman is happy to join longtime friend and dance colleague Jenna Riegel’s class at UMass Amherst for a guest class. She’ll be working with graduate and undergraduate students to reinvigorate their back-space after a long season of front-facing Zoom classes. They will work from set material as well as from scores for improvisation.
MBDance classes are based on modern, post-modern, and social dance techniques. They prepare dancers to share themselves with clarity and with control as well as with vulnerability and artistry. We use a variety of strategies to help dancers hone their responsiveness to other dancers and to both traditional and unexpected performance environments.
MBDance Artistic Director, Maria Bauman will lead a Renew & Restore Workshop as a part of The Gathering 2021. The Gathering, conceived by Camille A. Brown, serves as an open forum for intergenerational Black Women artists to support one another, advocate for greater cultural equity and acknowledgement in the contemporary dance world. Maria’s Renew and Restore workshop will be part of that support structure this year. With some portions of the workshop on-camera and some portions off-camera, we are embodying recuperation as part of the natural cycle that we insist upon.
Maria Bauman discusses her arts and community organizing practice and offers foundations for unlearning racism. She highlights ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), the grassroots group she co-founded with Sarita Covington and Nathan Trice. Bauman brings several ACRE members with her as guests for this Stanford University course, emphasizing how BIPOC artists are addressing racism through their creative praxis.
Maria Bauman is a guest speaker for a Dance History/Dance Studies course at Cornish College. This course focuses on race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class. Discussing intersectionality, and issues of identity, ownership, representation.
As a community organizer and artist still creating work and holding space for communities, like so many of us are, I am keenly aware of our dwindling opportunities for rest, stillness and renewal even amidst the global pandemic. The collective stress of navigating a break-neck pace while learning new ways of being and of connecting with people creates high levels of cortisol and keeps us from being the best family- and community-members we can be. During this workshop, we are slowing down to invite in restoration with guided breathing and light physical centering practices. The session includes both time with our cameras on to take solace in one another and with our cameras off to relax inward and be guided. Please have a small ball handy (ie. tennis ball or pinky ball). This experience is for people of all shapes, sizes, genders and abilities.
651Arts Salons have invited MBDance to help facilitate conversations and networking opportunities with artists and practitioners, and presenters through 651Arts Neighborhood Project.
The Neighborhood Project supports emerging Black Brooklyn-based artists by partnering them within their neighborhoods and reimagining these public spaces as homes for art-making and community engagement.
MBDance is working with The International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Open Space, Artist Connectivity Series.
IABD, in partnership with Francine Sheffield (Sheffield Global Arts Management) and Kristopher McDowell (KMP Artists), presents Open Space, an episodic series devoted to addressing pressing issues in the field of dance.
During this interactive online session, Maria Bauman-Morales presents a full-circle view of her artmaking and community organizing process and projects. She shares the “why” and “how” behind the the artwork she creates and behind the undoing racism organizing she is part of. She discusses her newest artwork, Desire: A Sankofa Dream, sharing video and behind-the-scenes process notes from the work. And Bauman-Morales brings to light the foundation of all her work, The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Principles of Anti-racist Community Organizing.
This community engagement opportunity was created as part of MBDance’s soon-to-premiere artwork Desire: A Sankofa Dream. Within the Desire: A Sankofa Dream artwork, Black queer performers practice radical consent and sovereignty in an intentional, public, digital performance-ritual environment. They unabashedly display their desire and care, transgressive to do in public.
This Imaging Consent, Dancing Desire companion workshop offers community members the chance to try on some of the themes and experiences from the artwork. This online, participatory seminar is open to all people, and no prior performance experience is necessary. Maria Bauman-Morales developed the Imagining Consent, Dancing Desire workshop from exercises and prompts she created for her cast, and folks first took part in the workshop during her Dance in Process residency at Gibney in New York, NY. During our time together, people will: practice a scored improvisation of kissing and screaming online as two visceral and performative actions; gain practice in verifying consent, invitation, excitement, and boundaries; complete writing exercises about sensuality and performativity