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Deprecated shortcode. Use For a fulfilling week in June you can experience Dancing With: Responding to our Environments, Each other, and Ourselves, lead by our Artistic Director, Maria Bauman. In this workshop artists will be invited to emphasize and explore the relational nature of dancing. Participants will dance with their environments, partner with each other, and dance with their ancestors and Spirit guides. Dancing will happen indoors and outdoors! If you’ve never been to Mt. Vernon, Maine you’re in for a treat! You’ll have easy access to a natural lake, daily chef prepared meals, luscious greenery, and rustic cabins. Wondering what you can expect? Make dancing in the woods part of your summer plans and join us! We can’t wait to explore with you! June 12-18, 2024 The intensive will include both daily technique, classes and artistic process work. Participants will be invited into processes that Maria is facilitating with her own dance company as they create their newest work, “These are the bodies that have not borne.” Afternoon sessions will include dancing from written prompts, from improvisatory scores and learning material from MBDance’s new work. Step into a world where plants talk to you sharing their wisdom with answers to your deepest questions… Join us for New Earth Bodies to learn how to communicate with plants. Rediscover your role as a creator and steward of Mother Earth. We are creators, and birthing humans is not the only legacy we leave. No matter who we are, we as humans are stewards of Mother Earth and it’s time to remember our power in bringing to life our liberated future. We are beings entrusted with the responsibility of nurturing our planet. New Earth Bodies is your opportunity to reconnect with the natural world and explore the profound connection between humans and plants. Join this immersive experience where you’ll learn the ancient arts of communicating with plants through a series of hands-on activities, guided meditations and interactive discussions. Unlock these sacred codes, journey to self-discovery and awaken your connection to the Earth. We are birthing the rEvolution towards a liberated and harmonious future. Are you ready? New Earth Bodies awaits you. Join us to sow the seeds of transformation together. Yura Sapi (they/them) is a visionary leader, creative activist, and interdisciplinary artist dedicated to co-creating joyful and abundant futures in harmony with each other and Mother Earth. Yura is Indigenous Kichwa, with Ecuadorian and Colombian citizenship and a lifelong connection to their birthplace on Manahatta island. Embracing their Kichwa name, Yura embodies strong roots and a profound connection to trees and plants. They have showcased their artistic talents as a performer and space curator at renowned venues such as Joe’s Pub and the Whitney Center for the Performing Arts and are published on platforms like HowlRound Theatre Commons and Community Centric Fundraising. Through their new nonprofit organization, LiberArte Inc., Yura collaborates to establish an artistic support network aimed at advancing racial, social, and climate justice on a global scale. LiberArte facilitates connections within the global community, fostering projects like food access farm Protectores de la Tierra, an artist-led initiative promoting AfroIndigenous farming and food sovereignty, originating in Nuquí, Chocó, Colombia; Balistikal, a queer arts and healing space offering virtual and in-person programs for the Spanish-speaking Latin American community; and the Building Our Own Tables Podcast which conducts interviews with BIPOC founders of arts organizations sharing their rEvolutionary leadership insights. Yura is a board member of the Arts Administrators of Color Network, a member of Artists Co-Creating Real Equity, and a 2023-24 Braiding Seeds Fellow. Yura offers a powerful vision of what this world can look like, and their work is making that vision a reality, one step at a time. About the workshop series: We launched our ABUNDANCE fundraising campaign recently and we’ve received such love from you all, already. Thank you. We are off to a hearty start and still have a ways to go to meet our goal! Please join us as we journey toward the premiere of These are the bodies that have not borne. an outdoor ritual performance premiering in 2025, that unearths technologies to celebrate, reimagine and nourish our wombs and the places where our wombs might be. Informed by ritual, land art, earth stewardship, social engagement, testimony and choreography. So far we have shared an in-process excerpt at BAAD!, curated an on-going multi-thematic workshop series, Glorious Bodies and expanded further with communities of land stewards, artists, organizers in New York State and beyond. Sowing into our ABUNDANCE means investing in our summer research which is pivotal to the creation of These are the bodies that have not borne. We are calling in at least $20,000 to: Keep imagining, researching and creating the work beyond this summer This space is tender. Participants can expect to be invited to share whatever feels safe about their own journey with their uterus/pelvic area/womb/any other term they may use to describe that place in their glorious bodies. You can share a lot or you can share nothing. We will hold it collectively. We will take time to journal and write to ourselves. We will share resources and offer support when welcomed to do so. There will be moments to reflect and process. We will hold ourselves lovingly within community and hopefully feel a little less alone and a little more connected in what we may be experiencing. We hope you will join us if this sounds like a space you may need or desire, please come. This space is for you! Ziiomi Law is a Blackqueer nonbinary icon. Professional dancer & performer, death doula, arts careworker, and writer++ nomadically based nowhere & working everywhere. Zii is an ever evolving Blackity Black, loudly queer artist, who sweats glitter & smells like sweet cocomango shea. They’re an embodied Et Cetera, period! As a multi-hyphenate, they give big GLIT energy on their best day/s. When dueting with liberation Zii comes out to play as D R I P, the freest version of themmeselves who does not know a world without pleasure & hopes you never do either. Swimming in the erotic, slithering up poles, & dancing as a fireworker & flow arts aerialist brings themme joy. They feel most fulfilled when collaborating on projects that feel like soul food. Raised in the South, grown across the East Coast, & seasoned with a generous dash of international spice; Zii carries home in their pockets. You can find them luxuriating at the intersections of both/and. They believe if it ain’t a full body YES, it’s a no! It is always their intention to collaborate, explore, & share in the continued spirit & effort to heal Blackqueer bodies. Ziiomi welcomes invitations to connect & create around: queering everything, worldbuilding/bending, immersive experiences, pleasure, liberation, ritual, Blackness, queer & trans magic, rest, living & dying from a place of satisfaction, & so much more this bio won’t hold. @ziiomizm About the workshop series: Led by Alexeya with sound healing by Reiki Lune. This session is designed to illuminate and activate the divine portal of creation within, revealing the seeds of new life that seek to be born through us. We will be engaging in a gathering of collective intention setting, guided energy work and akashic records meditation and group reflection. The Akasha is an etheric plane which holds record of each soul’s journey across time and space. In the Akasha, we can clear karmic contracts, integrate new gifts and gain insights on how to maximize our highest vibrational resonance in our present lives. Alexeya EM is an interdisciplinary performing artist and energy worker dedicated to raising the collective consciousness through her life and artistry. Her art exists at the intersection of music, choreography, leadership development, performance/event curation, mysticism, and energy work/healing arts. Through the themes of multidimensional expression, divinity, sacred sensuality, black liberation, and the divine feminine, Alexeya creates space for art and experiences that propel communal contemplation and transcendence. She received a BA in Dance Studies from the University of South Florida with an emphasis on research in Leadership Studies. After which, she danced professionally for Gibney Dance Company and worked as a freelance choreographer, creative director and performance coach in both commercial and concert dance. In 2016, Alexeya founded LEAD: Leadership for Emerging Artist Development, an immersive training program providing emerging artists with tools to cultivate an inclusive leadership presence. She has conducted leadership seminars for NYU School of Professional Studies, MOVE|NYC|, and Gibney Dance Center, amongst others. Alexeya has been releasing music as an independent recording artist since 2017. Her recent EP ‘ISIS’ explores the themes of cultivating the supreme divine feminine essence through embodied practice. She resides in New York City. About the workshop series: In this workshop we will explore ancient practices for healthy periods and recovery following miscarriage, abortion, and birth. When we honor our periods as a mini postpartum, worthy of care and rest, we learn how to be present for all bleeding transitions. Rooted in her work as a period and postpartum doula, mover, and herbalist, Rochelle offers techniques and frameworks for honoring sacred bleeding. This workshop will include guided self-touch and partnered touch. Those not interested in touch are still welcome to attend. Rochelle Jamila is a performing artist, choreographer, holistic period and postpartum doula, and practitioner of the feminine arts committed to the sovereignty of birthing and bleeding people on Earth. She weaves, movement, sacred song, energy work, herbalism, and ancient womb wisdom to hold space for the continuum of the womb. Rochelle believes full spectrum womb care, from menarche to menopause, radically reorients bleeding people to their divine power. Rooted in legacies of Black southern midwives, freedom fighters, prayer warriors, and root workers, she honors womb and birth care as a front line for liberation and planetary healing. Rochelle is honored to have supported over 200 families through reproductive transitions. Rochelle’s performance work imagines new worlds through channeled improvisation, earth-based ritual, and the physical and psychic realms of bleeding people. She is deeply influenced by her teachers within Indigenous Mexica and Tibetan Buddhist lineages as well as her family’s direct lineage in the Mississippi Delta and Caribbean. As a performer Rochelle has worked with artists such as Ebony Noelle Golden, Jasmine Hearn, Ambika Raina, Ogemdi Ude, Beth Gill, and Maya Lee Parritz. Rochelle graduated from Columbia University with a BA in Dance and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is currently blooming on occupied unceded Lenape and Canarsie land. About the workshop series: 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 An interdisciplinary project between Dance, Digital Media, the Pearlstein Gallery, the Writer’s Room, and students from West Philadelphia High School and lead artist and Rankin Scholar, Maria Bauman. An interdisciplinary project between Drexel University’s Dance Department, Digital Media, the Pearlstein Gallery, the Writer’s Room, students, multiple community groups including West Philadelphia High School and Rankin Scholar-in-Residence, Maria Bauman. During a three-week research-based residency Maria Bauman alongside Audrey Hailes and Drexel community collaborators will co-create an interactive installation; Womb: The Black Wealth Project. And on April 27th collaborators will share an activation of the installation. The project explores various manifestations of luxury, spaciousness, wealth and abundance and is rooted in community mapping and research including Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance, and using autoethnography as methodology. Photo credit: Chris Cameron Our Artistic Director, Maria Bauman, is choreographing and performing in The Motherboard Suite! This premiere brings to life a suite of music by musician, poet, actor Saul Williams. Directed by Bill T. Jones, this non-linear work is performed by Saul and his musical collaborators, and features seven choreographers. Maria Bauman, Kayla Farrish, Marjani Forté-Saunders, d. Sabela grimes, Jasmine Hearn, Shamel Pitts and Seattle choreographer Jade Solomon Curtis. Photo credit: Maria Baranova
Mt. Vernon, Maine
$850, includes tuition, room and food
GLORIOUS BODIES: EARTH – AND SOMATIC – HEALING SERIES CENTERING BLACK AND BROWN TECHNOLOGIES, is a public workshop series, January through June 2024, based on themes from MBDance’s/Maria Bauman’s current dance-ritual-artwork, These are the bodies that have not borne. Our new work is an outdoor piece based on multiple seemingly related and unrelated themes, synthesized through the MBDancers’ bodies and imaginations as a ritual and a performance. Many folks have shared that they want to engage in these topics with MBDance, so we’re sharing some of our research prompts, exercises, and guest facilitators with YOU!
Thank you for believing in this work and loving on us in this way. We appreciate you!
GLORIOUS BODIES: EARTH – AND SOMATIC – HEALING SERIES CENTERING BLACK AND BROWN TECHNOLOGIES, is a public workshop series, January through June 2024, based on themes from MBDance’s/Maria Bauman’s current dance-ritual-artwork, These are the bodies that have not borne. Our new work is an outdoor piece based on multiple seemingly related and unrelated themes, synthesized through the MBDancers’ bodies and imaginations as a ritual and a performance. Many folks have shared that they want to engage in these topics with MBDance, so we’re sharing some of our research prompts, exercises, and guest facilitators with YOU!
GLORIOUS BODIES: EARTH – AND SOMATIC – HEALING SERIES CENTERING BLACK AND BROWN TECHNOLOGIES, is a public workshop series, January through June 2024, based on themes from MBDance’s/Maria Bauman’s current dance-ritual-artwork, These are the bodies that have not borne. Our new work is an outdoor piece based on multiple seemingly related and unrelated themes, synthesized through the MBDancers’ bodies and imaginations as a ritual and a performance. Many folks have shared that they want to engage in these topics with MBDance, so we’re sharing some of our research prompts, exercises, and guest facilitators with YOU!
GLORIOUS BODIES: EARTH – AND SOMATIC – HEALING SERIES CENTERING BLACK AND BROWN TECHNOLOGIES, is a public workshop series, January through June 2024, based on themes from MBDance’s/Maria Bauman’s current dance-ritual-artwork, These are the bodies that have not borne. Our new work is an outdoor piece based on multiple seemingly related and unrelated themes, synthesized through the MBDancers’ bodies and imaginations as a ritual and a performance. Many folks have shared that they want to engage in these topics with MBDance, so we’re sharing some of our research prompts, exercises, and guest facilitators with YOU!
