Dixon Place Hosts: Indigenous Dance Forum Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU

About This Show

Blending interactive theater approaches with culturally immersive technologies, The Indigenous Dance Forum (IDF) is part community activation, part performance ritual, and part forum. Guided by intuition-led, process-based methodologies, IDF, the major outcome of Jack Gray‘s semester-long residency at the A/P/A Institute at NYU, implores us to find a way to create and articulate a deeper sense of connection to the place Mannahatta.

Curated by Gray, the performance features a stunning cohort of guest dance artist and scholar collaborators from around the word, along with local community members, who will physically encounter the Indigenous liminality of Lenapehoking. A journey of expanded senses, this one-time only pop-up event articulates the relationality of our urban tribe and invites body, mind, and spirit into this space of shared breath and collective resonance.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jack Gray (Ngati Porou, Ngapuhi, Te Rarawa, Ngati Kahungunu) is an acclaimed dancer, choreographer, and scholar. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Gray first connected to his cultural roots through traditional Māori dance, Kapa Haka, and later discovered contemporary dance. In 2000, he founded the Atamira Dance Company, an all Māori contemporary dance theatre, which has since become one of the nation’s premiere dance companies. Gray is committed to developing Indigenous epistemologies as a crossover into mainstream practices of dance and theatre. Since 2012, he has fostered an intercultural network of communities in the United States, activating cultural awareness and promoting strategies for Indigenous empowerment. He has collaborated with Dancing Earth Creations (New Mexico), Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum (Hawai‘i), University of California, Riverside, and University of California, Berkeley, among many organizations and institutions. He is the Spring 2016 Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Established in 1996, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU provides a space in which research and public programs, with a focus on community and intercultural studies, are made accessible to faculty, students, and the New York community within a broad, rigorous international and comparative framework. It produces programming, publications, exhibitions, new research, and a long-running artist-in-residence program, attracting leading academics and practitioners, and oversees multiple archival collection-building initiatives. The A/P/A Institute at NYU provides a nexus for scholars, community leaders, and artists who are working on advancing scholarship in the field and bringing theory into practice. www.apa.nyu.edu

Thursday, Apr. 21, at 7pm

Estimated Runtime
120 minutes

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Credits

Curated by
Jack Gray