Culture
Factory Street Focuses on Themes of Race, Privilege, Social Justice with Move It Dance Festival
By: Emily Votaw
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Factory Street Studio has put out a call for choreographic submissions from dancers and choreographers of all ages for adjudicated inclusion in Move It, a virtual dance festival seeking work that “engages with the themes of race, privilege, and social justice. The festival is especially interested in highlighting work by artists of color. Each submission should be 30-90 seconds long, and all submission are due by Saturday, August 15.
“The festival really came about as a response to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the recent cultural mass awareness of police brutality and racism in American culture,” said Angelica Bell, Factory Street Studio’s artistic director. “The festival is accepting applications from everybody, but it is interested in highlighting the work of people of color.”
The adjudication panel for the festival is impressive, including Travis Gatling, the Artistic Director and Head of Dance at Ohio University; Jazelynn Goudy, an Assistant Professor of Dance at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee; and Cierra Hill, a recent graduate of Ohio University’s BFA Dance & Choreography program.
“Dance is just one cultural avenue in life — but it is a powerful modality that a lot of people can find catharsis through, a lot of people can find expression through in a relatively safe way. There’s something called ‘artvisim,’ activism through art, and dance fits into that category,” said Bell. “This is a virtual space that we are hoping to provide that will be safe for people of color to participate in and share their work in and make pieces that are relevant to them and their experiences — and for white folks who are interested in really digging into ‘what does it mean to have white privilege?’ ‘what does it mean to be an ally to people of color?’ and to work that out in an embodied, kinesthetic, and artistic level.”
Factory Street Studio will be charging an “admission” price to view the festival, and 50 percent of those proceeds will go towards the Black Lives Matter movement, 25 percent of it will go to participants in the festival and the adjudicators, and the final 25 percent will be deposited into the Factory Street Studio Scholarship for Students of Color. Find more information about the festival, and how to submit, at this link.