| Click Here For Transitional Justice
Click Here For The Sahel A Crack In The Heart
Click Here For Hallowed
Click Here For Disappeared
A Dance Piece On Healing & Reconciliation
A means to healing & reconciliation in fundamentally divided communities. When communities are torn apart by indescribable violence, how do we achieve accountability and truly forgive? Do we have the strength to re-build and genuinely heal? How do we avoid a cycle of reckoning?
This piece is inspired by real people and events in communities around the world including Columbia, Guatemala, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, West Africa and elsewhere. After these communities experienced unspeakable atrocities, transitional justice was put into service to give people the chance to come forward, share their stories and re-build their relationships, their communities and their countries. The dance piece takes the audience on a journey of several different people’s lives twisting through time illuminating their intricate relationships, betrayals, traumas, fears, desires, moments of empowerment and finally
forgiveness.
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The Sahel: A Crack In The Heart
Directed By Christina Coleman
"The Sahel is a line. But it is also a crack in the heart-a tightrope, a brink a ledge. See how its people walk: straight-backed and on paths of red dust, placing one foot carefully before the other, as if balanced upon a knife edge. The Sahel is a bullet’s trajectory. It is the tracks of rain that fall but never touch the sand...It is a call for your blood, and for me a desert road without end."
- Paul Salopek
Humanity transcends culture, religion, race and nationality. While set in The Sahel, the music, the movement, the characters and the costumes signify the universality of the human condition. It could happen anywhere.
The performance we are creating is on the desertification of the Sahel region, a vast area of Africa. This region, just south of the Sahara Desert, occurs at the fault line of Arabic and African cultures. The problem of encroaching desert (which, it must be acknowledged, is not universally accepted), continues to disrupt the lives of millions of innocent people. In this artistic endeavor we can use the powerful, expressive potential of dance to portray these current life-and-death issues.
- We are not only addressing the issue of desertification, but we are also showing the many underlying factors that are at work here as well. We are doing character studies, depicting the role of the West, looking at the many cultures who live in the area, identifying the religions in the Sahel, recognizing the issues with property rights, illuminating the catastrophic results of desertification such as starvation, social conflict, and death and finally identifying the overall toll that desertification is taking on those who are left alive.
The Details:
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Hallowed
Directed by Christina Coleman
35 Minute Work
Hallowed is based off of a dystopian religion. It is not based off of any one singular religion, but rather blends all of the religions of our time together through music and movement. We see ethnic cleansing introduced into a community and how people respond: sometimes passive aggressively, other times underhandedly and finally with outright violence. We are questioning the seeds of ethnic hatred and people’s darkest fears.
As the creator of this new piece I hope to challenge how religious authorities respond to ethnic, cultural, racial, religious or national differences. Discrimination can start innocently enough but sometimes these seeds grow into much deeper and scarier situations. Religious tensions are some of the pressing issues of our time and this dance will delve into the emotional scape around this topic. Through the storyline,we unveil the human condition; its beauty and its flaws.
The Details:
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Disappeared
Directed by Christina Coleman
20 Minute Work
Sometimes in authoritarian regimes people are made to disappear.
The following quote is from Zarah Ghahramani's autobiography, My Life As A Traitor. The dance mixes text with movement to tell the countless stories of people who have been disappeared.
"What had I done to deserve this; voiced a few opinions, handed out petitions, gathered in street protests with my friends. I had never hurt anybody, never fired a gun, never thrown a stone. This is the horrifying contradiction of my situation. I want it to be known that I'm someone who loves peace and books and conversations with my friends. This is irrelevant to this man who stands before me, if his intentions are to kill me he will kill me. There is nothing in him to which I can appeal. Nothing. They can do anything. They can do anything. Dear God, they can do anything. Where are you taking me?
- Zarah Ghahramani (My Life As A Traitor)
The Details:
20 minute piece
9 dancers
1 actress
Music: Danny Gray
For more information about this work please contact
Christina Coleman @ christinalcoleman@gmail.com
www.ILLUMINATIONSDANCE.COM
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