Gerald Casel Dance: Not About Race Dance
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Gerald Casel Dance
Dance artist and equity activator Gerald Casel will present Not About Race Dance, a collaborative, choreographic response to the racial politics of U.S. postmodern dance. Despite postmodernism’s popularity, its racial dynamics have gone largely unacknowledged. In Not About Race Dance, Casel and his collaborators occupy a space that has been historically defined by white artists to present a contrasting vision of where Black and Brown bodies belong. When the work premiered this past December, the Fjord Review said that the dancers were “intensely present and riveting…reclaiming the literal and sociological ‘white space’ of postmodern dancing in episodes that are vulnerable, cathartic, clever, and delivered with compelling rigor.”
Photos by Robbie Sweeny
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Concept and direction by Gerald Casel
Performed by Gerald Casel, Styles Alexander, Audrey Johnson, Karla Quintero, and Cauveri Suresh
Live sound design by Tim Russell
Lighting and media design by Aron Altmark
Dramaturgy by Rebecca Chaleff
Gerald Casel is artistic director of GERALDCASELDANCE. His choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is an Associate Professor of Dance and Provost of Porter College at UC Santa Cruz. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW Milwaukee, Casel received a Bessie Award for dancing in the companies of Michael Clark, Stephen Petronio, Zvi Gotheiner, and Stanley Love. His choreography has been presented by Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, The Yard, ODC Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Dancebase Edinburgh, and Kuan Du Arts Festival Taiwan, and has been developed in residencies at The Bogliasco Foundation, The National Center for Choreography-Akron, ODC Theater, and CHIME. Dancing Around Race, a community engagement process that interrogates racial inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond continues to grow under his leadership. Casel’s Not About Race Dance has been awarded a National Dance Project grant, was in residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and premiered at CounterPulse with a forthcoming tour around the U.S.
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival continues to support La MaMa’s commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge audience’s perception of dance by featuring performance/installations, experimental film screenings & public symposiums which address dance artists’ engagement with the current political climate, as well as honoring diasporic histories and legacy, ancestral inspirations and inter-generational dialogue.