IMPROVISATION: Diasporic Modalities w/ Joya Powell

Class Description: IMPROVISATION: DIASPORIC MODALITIES: Freestyle, groove, jam: Improvisation has always been a key tool in the creation and evolution of dances of the African Diaspora. This workshop will deepen the inquiry of the Africanist aesthetic in dance through an improvisatory experiential framework. What movement conversations are created through a deep listening to self and our impulses to engage with sound/music, the environment, and our community? How do we honor the self in collective experiences? Participants will embody explorations of the improvisatory concepts, sequences, and modalities that are rooted in the dances of: Afro-Brazilian, Jamaican Dancehall, Jazz, African American Social Dances, and House. We will use the foundational improvisational principles of these dance forms through a balance of play, investigation, and rigor.

A multiethnic Harlemite, Joya Powell is a Bessie Award winning Choreographer and Educator passionate about community, activism, and dances of the African Diaspora. Hailed by The New York Times as a “radiant performer,” throughout her career she has danced with choreographers such as Paloma McGregor, Katiti King, Nicole Stanton, Neta Pulvermacher, and Mar Parrilla. In 2005 Joya founded Movement of the People Dance Company, dedicated to addressing sociocultural injustices through multidisciplinary Afrofuturist immersive contemporary dance. Her work has appeared in venues such as: BAM, Lincoln Center, SummerStage, Harlem Stage Gatehouse, La Mama, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Dance Complex (Cambridge), Mudlark Theater (New Orleans), Movement Research @ Judson Church, The School of Contemporary Dance & Thought (Northampton), BAAD! among others. In addition to being a performance-based company, MOPDC facilitates community engagements nationally and internationally, and they hold an annual Free Day of Dance and acclaimed Winter Intensive. Joya has choreographed such Off-Broadway plays as: Fit for a Queen by Betty Shamieh (The Classical Theatre of Harlem), JOB by Thomas Bradshaw (The FLEA Theater), Ducklings by Amina Henry (JACK), Songs About Trains by Beto O’Byrne (The New Ohio Theatre). As well as regional theater productions including: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney (Luna Stage, NJ), and Une Tempête by Aimé Césaire (The American Shakespeare Center, VA). Her chapters "How do you hold when you need to be held?: Dance and the embodied practice of grieving," and "A Grooveology: Reflections on Dance within Your Dance," are featured in Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times – Routledge, edited by Kendra Capece & Patrick Scorese and in Write Your Future, edited by Pepatián, respectively. Her research led her to teach and study in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, France, and Canada. Awards and recognition include: The Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Bessie Award, Dancing While Black Fellow, Women in Motion Commissioned Artist, EtM Choreographers + Composers Residency, Angela’s Pulse’s North Star Arts Incubator, CUNY Dance Initiative AIR, The Unsettling Dramaturgy Award. She is a collaborating member of Dance Caribbean Collective, Radical Evolution and is a co-leader of Angela’s Pulse’s Dancing While Black. She is also an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance and African-American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Artist Statement:

My embodied practices are in conversation with my ancestral dance vernaculars: a blend of African Diasporic movements with Jewish communal forms, wherein my learned experience of Contemporary dance is the shore they meet upon. The intricate tongues of improvisation, rooted in Jazz, Contemporary, Afro-Brazilian, and House vernaculars guide my research. Through a multidisciplinary Africanist mosaic of dance, spoken text, projections and live music, I use performance as an entryway, an offering to explore creative ways to initiate dialogue. The work I am invested in, considers historical and present sociocultural issues, uplifting collective resilience. My work doesn’t assume to know answers to the larger questions of undoing toxic systems, but rather aims to ask bold questions and instigate conversations. Although the themes I approach tend to be heavy, I lean into humor and satire to lighten the experience, allowing laughter to open space for deeper consideration. I embrace social dances like line dances as a means to stimulate memory or offer space for audience interaction - gathering bodies together for collective celebration and shared release.

Host or Publisher School For Contemporary Dance & Thought