NEW WORKS WORLD TRADITIONS MOVEMENT THEATRE

New Works is a transnational performance ensemble and Engaged Scholarship course at Brown University that utilizes research-to-performance methodologies towards the development of new theatre for the concert stage, educational outreach programs, film, international exchange projects, festivals, and for tours throughout the US. We write original music, text, create films, set designs, and work with world-class artists and scholars from Africa, Asia, the Global South, and across the USA to study political, biological and cultural landscapes as the basis for our creative investigations. New Works is comprised of Brown undergraduate students, graduate students, alums, faculty, community partners, and professional artist-activists who collaborate with NGOs from Mali and the USA on humanitarian projects.

Members of New Works have traveled to Mali, West Africa to collaborate on several international festivals including The Communal Bowl and for The Bloodline Project, which brought together global healthcare practitioners with non governmental organizations, professional institutions and artist- activists for performance symposiums on Malaria prevention, Malnutrition and Educational Advancement. New Works members serve as hosts for the annual The Rhythm of Change Festivals assisting in programming, fund raising, teaching workshops, or assisting our guest artists with all organizational and in the classroom needs.

Members of New Works are active teaching artists and activists in the local, regional and national communities. They have mentored and continue to mentor, teach, perform and work with underserved youth groups at AS220 Youth, Pushed Learning and Media, New Urban Arts, Boys and Girls Clubs of Rhode Island, City Arts, at the ACI, Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts, and for Adults with (Dis)Abilities.

Commitment to International Cultural Exchange, Engaged Scholarship with
Community Partners, and Educational Advancement

Recent international collaborations include THE DNA CAFÉ, a new work
developed in collaboration with Japanese Butoh Master Natsu Nakajima
and Zen Buddhist scholar Dr. Paula Arai. Community partners; RKR B-Boy
Crew, The Funk Underground Hip-Hop Musical Ensemble, Singer-songwriter
Ellen Santaniello, local filmmaker Anthony Andrade, Set Designer Renee
Surprenant, and Costume Designer Jess Darrell Jarbadan helped create the
overall content, look and structure of the performance alongside Brown
undergraduates and alums.

Between the Fall of 2015 through the Spring of 2018 ten West African Ballets were researched, developed and performed with Malian master artists Moussa Traore and Seydou Coulibaly. These ballets include Sunu- Manjiani, Dununba: Suspending Together, Sandia, Didadi, Bobodon, Wasalunka, The Kotelon, Marakadon, Dansa and Wolosodon. These were performed at various venues including the Spring Festival of Dance, The Commencement Dance Concert, for the Mande Fete, at the Afrika Nyaga festival, at RISD, and on tour into the schools.

Other concert stage performances included:

The Guest House. This new work was researched in part by studying the Bhava Chakra, or the Tibetan Wheel of Becoming, an iconic visual representation of the Buddhist notion of suffering and the process through which we end that suffering. Our main text and constant guide was “Eastern Body/ Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self” by Anodea Judith. Our weekly readings became points of reference and exploration for movement improvisations, text development, projections and film creations, meditations and musical scoring. The Cave Allegory from Plato’s Republic helped us look into notions of illusion and reality to build the overarching concept for the set and costume designs. The piece progressed through seven scenes built in accordance to how the seven chakras ascend upwards from the root earth-based seated pelvis to the crown of the head. Each chakra is associated with a specific emotional state, psychophysical developments, a color of the rainbow and our relationship with the natural world.

Guest artists co-taught and collaborated on the physical scores. RAW Dance from San Francisco worked on chakra #2 with a focus on guilt and weight sharing. Omari Wiles from Senegal/NYC taught us about the Ballroom Scene and Vogue Femme styles through a personal and historic framework. The cast of ANIKIYA’S Conference of the Birds created a score dealing with the Heart chakra playing with notions of love and grief.

The nature of the work was collaborative, communal in all aspects of creation, and a very successful example of mentorship between the professional community artists, international dance artists from around the world and the Brown/RISD students. This piece was premiered at the Spring Festival of Dance and restaged for the Commencement Dance Concert on the Stuart Stage.

DNA CAFÉ. The DNA Café received two different artistic residencies; One at the Dragons Egg Retreat Center and at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in CT. This original Movement theatre work was researched in Butoh, epi-genetics, Astrophysics, Buddhist philosophy, the Heart Sutra, the paintings of Iwasaki Tsuneo, Rumi poetry, Katsugen, Authentic Movement, physical theatre, and Contact Improvisation. International collaborators included Zen Buddhist scholar, Dr Paula Aria, Butoh Master teacher Natsu Nakajima, and community partners The Funk Underground, RKR B-Boy Crew, Designer Renee Surprenant, and Costume Designer Jesse. SFOD/CDC Spring of 2018

RIVERRUN The creation of this new work began while on artistic retreat at the Dragon’s Egg Retreat Center in Old Mystic, CT. The completed artistic product involved months of movement research and the development of a musical score that existed in the framework of seven movement theatrical scenes. These scenes explored the high poetic states of Buddhist teachings surrounding Stream Entry and the notion of River as consciousness. RiverRun was researched in poems, personal narratives, songs, images, news lines and histories about rivers, natural disasters and blessings for the Earth. I co-created and wrote this piece with Saulo Castillo from RKR, Sam Keemey Minor, a Brown undergraduate, Jennifer Avery and undergraduate students from Brown-RISD, members of Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts and Matthew Garza’11. SFOD and CDC in Spring of 2017.

MASKING explores the relationship between high imaginative states of creativity,
perfectionism and Mental Illness. Working in collaboration with Neuro Scientist and
former Buddhist nun, Eunmi Kim, and Dr. Bruce Becker we are currently enrolled in
a two year line of study at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and
Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Stress Reduction School.
This research is part of the MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) course
developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn that Ms Kim and I are both currently enrolled in. Here
daily assignments, writings and meditative practices are informing what
methodologies I will utilize to devise the new work in a non-invasive and healing
manner.

PROJECTS & PERFORMANCES (2004-2008)

The following works weave together specific historic, national and global concerns with film documentation, stark imagery, and high- energy music and dance to bring awareness to import issues. Each new work strives to educate through a sensitization of thought, and by doing so, provoke questions, dialogues, and activism. 

The Bloodline Project (2008)explores Nature’s sublime elegance and intelligence to teach us the complexities of infectious dis-ease in West Africa, with a plea for preventive measures and intervention in effectively treating malaria and other endemic diseases. The Bloodline Project traveled and toured to Mali, West Africa in the summer of 2008 to engage in a transnational collaboration with healthcare workers, artist/activists, community and public health leaders, and local communities to create and present educational programs on Malaria prevention.

The Songbird (2007) is a celebration of the American family. Dances, songs and stories from pre-revolutionary Russia, Ethiopia, West Africa, Appalachia, and American urban centers are supported by archival photos, memoires, and personal narratives across generations.

Sacrifice of Marrow (2006) is a 45- minute movement theatre piece that explores the sights and sounds of pre-coup d’etat Mali, West Africa. In the early months of 1991, students, labor organizers, community leaders, artists and human rights activists organized protests and the eventual overthrow of the corrupt dictatorship of General Moussa Traore. It was not uncommon for those opposed to his rule to disappear in the night without a trace and for family members to find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. 

Melting Into Glass (2005) exists as a rhythmic poem where images unfold to the sonorities of a haunting cello score. Melting Into Glass explores the plight of refugee populations across the world, internally displaced people, and the struggles a family faces as they are pulled apart from home by our addictions to war. The search for cultural memory, home, and place are mirrored by refugee texts and letters of love sent from the front. 

Dreamscapes from the Famished Road (2005) explores the infant mortality crisis in West Africa, the rise of Neo-cons and the cost of political fanaticism to our humanity through the fusion of Mande proverb, song, and music with American vernacular and spoken word verse. 

Panya Machette (2004) takes place on the Street, where economic, social, political, and personal narratives intermingle. The staged images are inspired by traditional CAribbean folklore, contemporary prose, and scenes of "children of the night", those street children who have been exploited by church and state.