Group of NY Funders Support History-Making Performance Celebrating Black Choreographers
With support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Con Edison, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Brooklyn-based 651 ARTS and RestorationART’s have collaborated to present a history-making presentation of Gesel Mason Performance Projects’ (GMPP) “No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers”, April 6-7, 2018 at the Billie Holiday Theater.
For the past 15 years, GMPP founder Gesel Mason has created a love letter to Black dance history through “No Boundaries”’ celebration of solos crafted by such leading Black choreographers as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Robert Battle and Dianne McIntyre. In its final presentation, the one-woman performance will feature solos by Mason, Donald McKayle, David Roussève, Bebe Miller, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Rennie Harris, along with a newly commissioned piece by Kyle Abraham.
“‘No Boundaries’ has become a bridge between the past and the present,” said Mason. “I believe there is something vital about embracing our legacies and our stories to learn from as we forge new paths into the future work.”
Through this project, Mason has become a living archive and testament to these choreographers’ works. Now, the performances, themselves, will be filmed and preserved to create an historical archive commemorating their legacies along with interviews, dance shorts and documentation of selected choreographies….