DIASPORADICA Workshop Series-Monday

Join jose e. abad, Clarissa Rivera Dyas, and Joanna Haigood for a dynamic, collaborative exploration of Fort Mason Center for the Arts rooted in tuning in, scaling out, and exploring the poetics of space and place. You are invited into a practice of full body listening—where the body becomes both receiver and interpreter of space, history, and site-specific research. Open to dancers, interdisciplinary artists, and movers of all backgrounds, this 3-hour session offers an opportunity to deepen your practice in conversation with place and community. 

About the artist: 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, the Rainin Arts Fellowship, Doris Duke Artist Award and recently the Dance Magazine Award. Joanna has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the National École des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center and at Zaccho Studio.

A sonic and somatic three-hour workshop co-taught by Ishamel Houston-Jones, Stephanie Hewett, and Gabriele Christian centering storytelling, using live sound mixing, extemporaneous movement, and lipsyncing as formative tools for composing and performing emergent solo and collective stories. Come with movement clothes, sounds and songs (ballads, verses, shanties, arias, et al) you know by heart. Open to dancers and sound artists of all levels. 

About the artist: Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed worldwide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland, and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett, and a fourth "Bessie" for contributions to the field of dance. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels, which centered on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.

As an author, Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His first book, FAT and Other Stories was published by Yonkers International Press in June 2018. 

Houston-Jones is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2024, he was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival. His work has been supported by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Herb Alpert Foundation, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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