Dancing Across Borders: Refugees at Home + Abroad
Dancing Across Borders: Refugees at Home & Abroad | The Modern Dance Awareness Society + Dance Afghanistan
Saturday, May 13, 2017, 12-4pm
Anita's Way
137 West 42nd Street
(the through-block connecting 42nd and 43rd streets,
between Broadway and 6th Ave)
New York, NY
Nearest Trains: 1, 2, 3, S, 7, B, D, F, M, N, Q, R
Schedule of Events:
Performance at Anita's Way, 12pm-2pm (Click here to RSVP)
12pm-1pm - Film screening of "passTRESpass", "bodies of resilience", and a preview of "Journey Without a Map" by filmaker, Jill Woodward
1pm-1:45pm - "Proximity", a trans continental performance with the Modern Dance Awareness Society, with and for refugee accommodation and solidarity Hotel City Plaza residents and video artist, Maria Juliana Byck
Gathering at the Dance Loft, 2pm-4pm (Reservations Required)
Fundraising event featuring light fare, traditional Greek and Afghan dance performances, Afghan poetry readings, and a presentation by the "Generation Outside of Afghanistan Network" about their research in Greece concerning Afghan refugee quality of life, followed by a Q&A discussion. *All proceeds from the event will go towards supporting proximity Athens refugee cast, refugee support organizations, and Dance Afghanistan project.
The day’s performances and activities will run from 12-1:45pm at Anita’s Way (135 W 42nd St, New York) and from 2-4pm at nearby dance loft between 6th and Broadway on W44th (address sent upon RSVP and ticket purchase).
From 12-1:45pm, Anita’s Way will feature film screenings of Jill Woodward's bodies of resilience, passTRESpass, and preview of journey without a map. The modern dance awareness society will also be restaging proximity, a transnational dance dialogue, with performers Wen-Shuan Yang, Abdul Nazari and residents of Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City Plaza via Skype from Athens.
From 2-4pm, events at the dance loft will feature light fare, traditional Greek and Afghan dance performances, Afghan poetry readings, a presentation of “Generation Outside of Afghanistan” research project led by Kristina Colovic in Greece between 2003 and 2016 with Afghan refugees, and a Q&A session.
For free tickets to the Fundraising Event, please RSVP
About the Artists
Despina Sophia Stamos is a dancer/choreographer living and working in NYC since 1989. Her work has been presented throughout New York City at such venues as Dance T heater Workshop, PS122, PS1, as well as internationally in Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Puerto Rico. Since 2000, Stamos has been creating work for public spaces that addresses the concerns of local communities and local artists. She facilitates a collaborative process with the artists, activists and local communities with the goal of creative community development. In 2008, she was chosen as part of the Winter Summer Institute. http://www.maketheatre.org/ The WSI is a multicultural collaboration between participants from four universities on three continents and villagers from the rural mountains of Lesotho, to create work that addresses the AIDS pandemic. Her interest in site-specific work has been developing since 1998 when she was invited to be a participating artist in Julie Atlas Muz' 24 Hours on the Staten Island Ferry. Since then, she has performed and organized events in a plethora of locations including Times Square, the NYC subways, piers, parks, bathrooms, elevators and gardens. In 2006, she initiated and collaborated on the community project, passTRESpass, a multimedia performance installation in a former community market place addressing immigration, in Athens, with the United African Womens’ Organization of Greece. The work has developed since then to working with asylum seekers and Greek local artists in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013, in performance and with film. passTRESpass 2013, included over 40 participants for the three week intensive workshop, 20 performers, ranging in age from 7 to 70, from Syria, Afghanistan, Senegal, Mauritania, Albania, Tanzania and Greek artists and community members.
She dances with the Hungry March Band. Stamos is founding member of the Modern Dance Awareness Society.
Stamos has also curated various dance events including Deli Dances in Times Square, Dancehouse at Workhouse Theater, 21 Suffragettes at Galapagos and Oasis. For more information, contact despinasophia@hotmail.com
Jill Woodward is a filmmaker, freelance editor, and dancer. She began her broadcasting career at CNN shortly before the first Iraq War, and covered nearly every global crisis until 2006 from the headquarters in Atlanta and New York. She lived in Amsterdam for two years, working for the English language news division of Radio Netherlands. Following her return to New York City in 2009, Jill began a collaboration with choreographer Despina Stamos on a dance project with refugees in Greece. She directed a trilogy of short documentaries as a result: passTRESpass, bodies of resilience, and Journey without a Map, a work in progress. Her first film as director, "passTRESpass", documents the creation of a public dance performance with asylum seekers in Greece. The film was screened in London, New York City and Athens. It was also used as a teaching tool at the study abroad program at the International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies in Athens. "bodies of resilience" is an experimental dance film that showcases several of these same immigrants three years later. It screened at the 2014 Athens Video Dance Festival, and the 2016 Socially Relevant Film Festival in NYC. An excerpt was shown at the Society of Dance History Scholars + Congress on Research in Dance 2014 Joint Conference in Iowa. In 2016 she was an editor on the feature documentary Get Me Roger Stone, which premieres at Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. She collaborates with the dance collective mdas, and dances with the Hungry March Band. She graduated from the College of Communication at Florida State University in 1989.
Angela Mariana Schöpke is a New York based choreographer, dancer, researcher. Angela's work draws inspiration from deep investigations of history and emotional narrative, and is committed to making spaces for people to engage in dialogue about cultural identity questions. Angela recently founded Dance Afghanistan, an organization that grew from a research fellowship that investigated the role and value of dance in Afghan communities around the world. Angela decided to found Dance Afghanistan, a platform for in-person, written, photo, and video content exchange about contemporary Afghan dance practices with a mission of making a safe space for dialogue surrounding these practices and related contemporary cultural questions.
Angela's most recent choreographic work includes working as associate choreographer on Paul Peers and Matt Marks' opera, Mata Hari (New York, January 2017) and teaching Barre á Terre classes at Peridance Capezio Center. Angela's new dance-theater work, Atom Skin I, premièred in March 2017 (California), with Atom Skin II premièring April 2017 (Philadelphia). Previous choreographic works include Kaffeezeit (New York 2016), Keeping Up Appearances (New York 2015) Cable Table (Washington, DC 2013), and Communidemonation (Washington, DC 2012). In 2014, Angela received the Maida Withers Dance Construction Company Innovation Award for "daring to walk the tightrope between originality and risk in performance art and the formality of the theater stage" (Washington, DC).In addition to research, choreographic and performance work, Angela covers dance for theater and dance publication CultureBot (www.culturebot.org).
