Leslie Parker Dance Project’s Divination Tools: imagine home
Thursday, October 5 | 7:30PM
Friday, October 6 | 7:30PM*
Saturday, October 7 | 7:30PM
Divination Tools: imagine home is the latest iteration of NYC & Twin Cities-based artist Leslie Parker’s multi-year project, Call to Remember. Divination Tools: imagine home brings together a powerful collective of Black visual artists, musicians, and femme dance artists to explore improvisation through storytelling, music, film, movement, visual art, Black divinity/lineage, and contemporary experience. The collective work cultivates space for conjuring and building community through remembrance. Performers include Parker, Tenisha George, and Paloma McGregor as well as musicians Nioka Workman, Dameun Strange, and Michael Wimberly.
Parker researched and developed this work, in part, at Danspace Project during a Creative Residency in 2022. Parker’s time at Danspace Project included an exploration of the organization and its relationship to Black Dance Improvisation – through the archives, artist and Church community networks, and its physical location over the decades.
*On Friday, October 6, at 7PM, Leslie Parker and Black Gotham Experience will host a pre-show procession (approximately 20 minutes of walking) that will take place near Danspace Project’s location. Ticket-buyers for this evening will receive information on the meeting place a day in advance. Participation in the procession is optional.
Divination Tools: imagine home is co-commissioned by Walker Art Center (MN), Pillsbury House Theatre (MN), Pangea World Theater (MN), Danspace Project (NYC), and Counterpulse (SF).
Before you visit:
Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project
Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, and performer born in the traditional homeland of the Dakhóta, Anishinaabe people also known as Twin Cities, MN. Her upbringing in the neighborhood known as the Rondo community led to cultivating multiple home art bases in Brooklyn, NY and St. Paul, MN while holding a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, and a MFA in Dance from Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, The Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and The Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. As a dance creative, she highlights unique individual contributions, digs into collective memory to engage with the world more imaginatively and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic physical/movement hybrid influenced by the Black and African Diaspora: Traditional W. African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern technique derived from and exchanged across multiple continents. She has received a 2017 Bessie award for Outstanding performer as part of Skeleton Architecture, a 2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, and is a Jerome Artist Fellow 2019 – 2021. Parker initiated Leslie Parker Dance Project, LLC as a means to experience dance art more intuitively. As an educator, she led and facilitated classes as a guest assistant professor at Carleton College, a lecturer at University of Minnesota and as a guest artist instructor at various institutions in the US. Her most recent multi-year work, Call to Remember, is rooted, researched, and performed through residencies, stage performances and workshops across the US, including, Minneapolis, MN, at Walker Art Center, Pillsbury House Theatre, and Pangea World Theatre, San Francisco, CA, at CounterPulse, New York, New York at Danspace Project, Tallahassee, FL, at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Philadelphia, PA, at BOOM. Call to Remember and latest iteration, Divination Tools: imagine home is funded by National Dance Project/nefa, National Performance Network Creation Fund, National Performance Development Fund and National Performance Network Community Engagement Fund, Minnesota Regional Arts Council and Minnesota State Arts Board.
For more detailed information, go to www.leslieparkerdance.com.
