UNCA’s dance program creates site-specific dances, Oct. 27 & 29

Press release from UNC Asheville:

UNC Asheville’s Dance Program will present Moving Voices Oct. 27-29, a series of site-specific dances, as well as a community dialogue, in on- and off-campus locations. UNC Asheville Assistant Professor Celia Weiss Bambara, director of the university’s Dance Program, will co-direct and co-choreograph Moving Voices, along with visiting scholar Jana Schmueck of Germany. These events, all free and open to everyone, will feature UNC Asheville dance students and community dancers.

Bambara says “Moving Voices will engage with social justice issues in North Carolina and Germany, including identity struggles during political and economic change, ethnic differences, class differences and gender-based inequalities. We are wedded to the specific intersections of these issues with the sites that we are interested in working in. These works intersect with notions of home, losing home, and re-patriating ideas of self and space in reference to shifting identities in democracies.”

Oct. 27 – Downtown Asheville

·        Site-specific performance at Pack Square. 3 p.m.

·        Dialogue about dance. Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 120 College St. 4 p.m.

Oct. 29 – UNC Asheville Campus

·        Site-specific performance outside of Brown Hall. Noon.

·        Site-specific performance on the Ramsey Library steps. 5:30 p.m.

Moving Voices stems from a partnership between Bambara’s CCBdance Project, UNC Asheville’s German Program, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville Ballet and Schmueck’s TanzArt in Germany to facilitate both a residency for a series of site-specific dances and dialogue about process and making in experimental dance.

Jana Schmueck is a teacher, dancer and choreographer. She received instruction in ballet, jazz and modern dance and continued her dance and dance teacher training as a visiting student at the Palucca School with a focus on jazz at Young Mi Lee, as well as other intensive dance studies in contemporary jazz and Cunningham Technique in New York City. In 2010, she co-founded Prospect Dance Company with Anne Dietrich. Since 2014 they are artistic directors and founders of TanzART a center for contemporary dance in Germany, offering classes, workshops, artist in residence programs, performances, and productions with a focus of intercultural and international exchange.

Celia Weiss Bambara is a dual citizen of the United States and Burkina Faso and maintains a bi-national pick-up company in the Ivory Coast and North Carolina, the CCBdance Project. Celia is a practice-based scholar and her work addresses the intersections of practice as research. Her movement research combines the base of Haitian dance with other African forms, modern/contemporary dance, yoga and Klein Mahler technique with improvisation and physical theater. Her dance work has been shown in the United States, and internationally in the Caribbean, West Africa and in Europe. She completed long-term contemporary dance based projects in Abidjan between 2013 and 2015 and in Haiti between 1999 and 2003. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside and is an assistant professor of dance and director of the Dance Program at UNC Asheville.

For more information, visit dance.unca.edu