Red Clay Dance Company is excited to close out our 14th Season with the world premiere of Rest.Rise.Move.Nourish.Heal.
Rest. Rise.Move.Nourish.Heal is a site-responsive dance ritual created by Founder and Artistic Director Vershawn Sanders-Ward in collaboration with composer/music director avery r. young, filmmaker Jovan Landry, and with costumes by Kelley KFLEYE Moseley and Evelyn Danner. This new work was developed in response to the urban farm, ART ON THE FARM in GRANT PARK, a space stewarded and visually designed by Erika Allen and Urban Growers Collective. Sanders-Ward visions this work as "a practice, a process, an uncovering of the beautiful labor of bringing us ALL home to land, reclaiming ancestral cultural traditions, technologies, and tools that can lead to individual and collective healing." We invite you to witness this righteous journey!
PURCHASE TICKETS
To ensure that we consider the variable income levels within our community we have elected to offer sliding scale ticket pricing for this performance. Please select the option that matches the level of investment you are able to make at this time.
All tickets are general admission and allow you to bring the type of seating that is most comfortable for you (i.e lawn chair, blanket, or just lay out on the grass).
Follow The Creative Process
Rest. Rise.Move.Nourish.Heal is site-responsive dance ritual created by Vershawn Sanders-Ward/Red Clay Dance Company. Developed on the urban farms of Chicago-based Urban Growers Collective, the work is an outgrowth of the collaborators' short film "under god & moonlight" (2020). This film explored the traumatic relationship that developed between Black bodies and land due to many factors. First, the intentional and systemic exploitation of Black labor, secondly, state-sanctioned violence against Black Farmers and landowners, and thirdly, land theft and discriminatory lending practices. This new work is an artistic approach towards healing this relationship by reclaiming and activating time-honored Black/African-Indigenous traditions and technologies that support spiritual fulfillment and physical well-being for our people.
“When we as Black people are bombarded with messages that our only place on land is as slaves, performing dangerous and backbreaking menial labor, to learn of our true and noble history as farmers and ecological stewards is deeply healing.” ~ Leah Penniman, Farming While Black
THE HARVEST
Embodied Research with Urban Growers Collective during the Harvesting Season.
SHAPING THE CLAY
with Founding Artistic Director & CEO Vershawn Sanders-Ward
CREATING FERTILE GROUNDS
Partnering with Urban Growers Collective for experiences centered on communal healing.
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The food system is built upon land theft and genocide of indigenous people and the exploitation of Black and Brown labor. Black farmers currently operate around 1% of the nation’s farms, having lost over 12 million acres to USDA discrimination, racist violence, and legal trickery. 85% of the people working the land in the US are Latinx migrant workers, yet only 2.5% of farms are owned and operated by Latinxs. People of color are disproportionately likely to live under food apartheid and suffer from diabetes, heart disease, and other diet related illness. Labor laws continue to permit the exploitation of farm and food workers. How do we disrupt and dismantle this unjust system?
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The company will embark on two creative residencies in April 2022 to Trillium Arts in Mars Hill, NC and then to the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in John’s Island, South Carolina in support of experiential research and development of the work.
Collaborators
Lead Partners
Lead Funders
Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to the moment we are now in. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgment are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth. We pay respects to their elders past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that we are also a part of bringing us together here today. We invite you to use www.Native-Land.ca to identify the lands which you are on. As we center ourselves toward the work let us remember those for whom equity was not an option. (Used with permission by The International Association of Blacks in Dance.)