.: Dance Immersions 2010 Showcase - Kashedance presents: "In SEARCH of OURselves"

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Dance Immersions 2010 Showcase - Kashedance presents: "In SEARCH of OURselves"

In 2000 Kevin Ormsby left Canada to dance with the Garth Fagan Dance Company in New York and returned to Toronto in 2006. “There’s a classical Jamaican saying that ‘If there’s no opportunity out there for you, create your own’. I came back with a passion for choreography and for teaching.

The former assistant artistic director at Ballet Creole says since coming back to Toronto he views dance differently. KasheDance, his dance company, emerged from that longing for a different understanding of what he thinks dance can be in the city.

The inspiration for the piece that will be showcased May 27-29, In Search of Our Selves, came from seeing Wardance, a documentary about war in Northern Uganda and what it did to the children and the Arts in that country.

“In SEARCH of OURselves” is a dance work looking at displacement of people across borders inspired by the documentary War dance, Native displacement and trans –cultural theme of a retrospective optimism of a humanity that questions existence. In SEARCH of OURselves is fueled by one single inquiry; If you knew your life was about to change, what questions would you ask yourself? Do the answers lie within? How we affirm who we are beyond odds? This is where the story begins. The answers to which we arrive become an armour to the spirit of who we are. The movement in the piece includes Dinki and Kumina.“I search for a more human expression than a more cultural or traditional expression,” says Ormsby.

Ormsby says KasheDance is a company in constant maturation, and credits it as the only contemporary dance company run by a Jamaican Canadian.

About the Choreographer
Kevin A. Ormsby unique dance history has taken its form from his training in modern, ballet and African / Caribbean dance over twenty years. He has danced with Garth Fagan Dance (NY), was the Assistant to the Artistic Director and dancer with Ballet Creole and has worked with Canboulay Dance Theatre, Up from the Roots Entertainment, Menaka Thakur, Caribbean Dance Theatre. Kevin has also performed in works by Bill T. Jones, Katti King, Mark Morris, Gesel Mason, Ron K. Brown. He has presented papers on Dance at The Canada Dance Festival (2009) Biannual Conference, Visualizing / Performing Africa at Ohio University (2007), has written for the Dance Current and Expose Entertainment Magazine as well being on the Board of Prologue to the Performing Arts as the Artist Representative. Mr Ormsby has received Grants from the Canada Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and had sat on the Ontario Arts Council's Dance Initiatives Jury (2007) and Artists in Education Panel (2008) and was recently appointed to a Toronto Arts Council Committee (2010).

About KasheDance
In a state of constant maturation, KasheDance presents contemporary works that transcends cultural boundaries and resonates with the universal human spirit through kinetic movement and rhythmic vitality. Technically versatile in its execution and delivery, movements of traditional and modern dance is fused with ballet to reflect a contemporary synthesis. The Company’s style is explosive, subtle, confronting, virtuosic yet passionate and aims to give voice to the complexity of the human spirit through contemporary dance.

KasheDance artists are Kevin A. Ormsby, Jasmyn Fyffe, Kerry –Ann Wright, Darcel Frederick, Ian Huggins and Tereka Tyler Davis and selected members from the community.

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com