Je Te Souhaites Du Bien et Apres...- Screen Dance
Celia Weiss Bambara
Saturday
14:30 - 15:00
ONLINE
Art/Video Installation
This project “ Je Te Souhaites Du Bien et Après…Is This What We Are Looking For?” draws upon the often used phrase in Francophone Africa, “ I wish you well” and then adds in a notion of linguistic play or questioning. This question pertains to what happens after those well wishes are uttered. This project comments upon the violence that we do to each other every day when we turn off those well wishes, becoming numb, so to speak. The dance explores how we could possibly create a utopic vocabulary or world that evolves out of this blindness. The work then creates a series of connections where there are none in order to both propose a new way of seeing and “speaking.” We are seeking to answer questions about finding utopic spaces and places that allow us to bridge our realities and understandings. What we are looking for is a new language to help us express some sense of compassion, in-depth social justice values and ability to work across difference. The container for the work is the structures developed through accumulation that express the stages in locating this utopic afro-modern reality.
Celia Weiss Bambara is a dance artist and scholar as well as director of the CCBdance Project, which was created in 2006 with Burkina Faso born artist Christian Bambara. The CCBdance Project is an African contemporary company that addresses the thematic materials of anti-racism, interculturalism, travel, translation and love. Celia creates dance works, film, site-dance, improvisation and new written work that engages these endeavors. Her dance work has been shown in Europe, Africa, the Carribean and extensively in the United States. Her movement research combines the base of Haitian dance with other African forms, modern/contemporary dance, yoga and Klein Mahler technique and Body Mind Centering. Dr. Bambara’s work addresses the intersections of practice as research in contemporary and African diasporic dance. She has published a chapter on contemporary dance making in the works of women choreographers’ who have mentored her or with whom she has collaborated in Port-au-Prince in Susanna Sloat’s 2010 volume on Caribbean Dancemaking. The Journal of Haitian Studies has also published two articles on Haitian dance and articulations of diaspora. The Chicago Artist Resource and Chicago’s Social Justice Journal Area Magazine, have published works that addresses her artistic work through dialogue about improvisational practices, movement research, and social justice.