bkSOUL is the final guest company in the Lawrence University Dance Series this year. Don’t miss this multi-disciplinary performance collective.
There are FOUR ways to interact with bkSOUL:
1. “ILLEGIBLE” performance – Friday, April 13th 7:00pm in Esch/Hurvis, WCC
FB event link and LU Dance Series link here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/205185860238173/
https://www.lawrence.edu/conservatory/performance_series/dance_series
Read below for more details.
2. Open community Dance class – Thursday, April 12th 9:00-10:50am in Esch studio, WCC (contact Margaret Paek for more details)
3. Open community Musicians in Movement creative class – Thursday April 12th 2:30-4:20pm in Esch studio, WCC (contact Margaret Paek for more details)
4. Open Music & Movement Family Jam – Saturday, April 14th, 10:30am-12:00pm, in Esch studio, WCC.
FB event link here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1703525266392934/
bkSOUL was founded in 2001 by Dr. grace shinhae jun as a space to explore the relationship between Hip Hop culture and modern dance, debuting with the evening length work Women Warriors in Love & Hip Hop. The company began as a bi-coastal company (San Diego – Brooklyn), teaching and performing at various venues in Southern California, Brooklyn, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Indiana, San Francisco, and Mexico. In 2006, bkSOUL deepened its roots in San Diego and began collaborating with Collective Purpose (Ant Black, Kendrick Dial and Rudy Francisco), blending together movement, poetry, and live music to center on issues of social justice and communities of color through a Hip Hop framework. This award-winning performance company has created six evening length works: The Movement (2007), Hip Hop Saved My Life (2009), Love H.E.R. (2013), Illegible (2015), Still Moving (2016), The Lioness (2017), and received “Best Musical Performance” (2016) and “Outstanding Performance” (2017) for their work at the San Diego International Fringe Festival. In 2016, celebrating the 10 years of working together the dancers, the poets, and musicians fully merged to perform solely as the conscious performance group bkSOUL. As educators, mothers, fathers, activists, and artists, bkSOUL is committed to education through the arts, to courageous insight and truth, and to helping strengthen our justice movement today.
Directors: Ant Black, grace shinhae jun, Jesse Mills, Christopher Rice-Wilson
Poets: Ant Black, Kendrick Dial, Miesha Rice-Wilson
Musicians: Shivon Carreño, Loren Dempster, Jesse Mills
Dancers: Lauren Dockweiler, Jessica Gilmore, grace shinhae jun, Ian Isles
Description of their performance work – “ILLEGIBLE”
Legibility – Having a quality that is clear to read.
To be legible is to be easily understood. Black bodies are most legible when they are policed, incarcerated, and subject to surveillance. The alternative to this presentation is through comedic, grotesque, or outrageous caricatures. These legible images of Black men and women reflect the longstanding racial prejudices and the way in which these bodies are dealt with in every institution in the United States.
To be illegible is to have qualities that make it difficult to be read, comprehended, and understood by others. Black bodies are illegible when they are not complicit in their role of the public imagination. To be illegible is to fully embrace the complexity of Blackness in a country that does more forgetting than remembering what we have done to Black bodies.
Illegible is a collaborative project that addresses the acrimony and injustice around the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Through the culture of hip-hop, the scholarship of Mark Anthony Neal, and the narratives of each performer, bkSOUL explores the meaning of illegibility with poetry, music, and dance.
There will be a post-performance talk.
Heavy topic, but family-friendly (meaning that there is no foul language, and children are welcome.)
Free!
Supported by the LU Dance Series and
the following Lawrence University student-run clubs/LUCC:
As I Am
Alianza
Black Student Union
Dance Team
Deep Listening Club
LUNA
Melee Modern Dance Club