Fifth Annual Motion State Dance Festival

It’s the fifth annual Motion State Dance Festival! This dazzling array of performances, dance films and artist/audience interactions present the latest in contemporary dance and movement-based art. The festival gathers local and national, emerging and established dance artists to share their boundary-pushing creative explorations with a growing Rhode Island dance audience in four different evening programs.

This year’s festival features live performances from Molly Lieber (NY) & Eleanor Smith (NY), Lacina Coulibaly (CT), and Kathy Westwater (NY) & Lance Gries (NY/RI), and the return of the Small Moves, Big Picture evening, featuring short dances on a tiny stage by Makisig Akin (Berlin) & Anya Cloud (CO), Alex Davis (MA), Barbie Diewald & Meredith Bove (MA), Daniel McCusker (MA), NANO (RI), and Jessica Pearson & April Brown (RI).

The fifth-anniversary festival also includes dance films from around the world, post-show talks and parties, and classes with the artists to round out the five-day extravaganza.

Kicking the festival off on February 26 at 7:30 pm, will be Playing Favorites, which highlights favorite dance films from the first six seasons of ScreenDance RoadShow, Motion State’s traveling dance film series that tours throughout New England. Films to be announced soon!

Small Moves, Big Picture takes place on February 27 at 7:30 pm. This is a spunky mix of live dance performances on a small stage juxtaposed with dance films on a big screen. Performances by Makisig Akin (Berlin) & Anya Cloud (CO), Alexander Davis (MA), Barbie Diewald & Meredith Bove (MA), Daniel McCusker (MA), Jessica T. Pearson & April Brown (RI), and NANO(RI). Performances will be interspersed with a variety of dance films on the big screen, to be announced, and followed by a post-show artist talk.

Friday, February 28 will be a Double Bill featuring Lacina Coulibaly, and Kathy Westwater & Lance Gries. This shared evening will showcase a diversity of aesthetics and approaches to contemporary dance, followed by a post-show conversation with the artists.

Until the Lion Tells the Story…,choreographed and performed by Lacina Coulibaly (CT), is a heartfelt tribute to the remarkable African scholars who have ignited a fire in Coulibaly. It is an attempt and desire of the Burkina Faso artist to envision an African Renaissance, a different Africa that is rooted in its own indigenous knowledge, drawing inspiration from its cultural diversity, from ancient Egypt to the Mali Empire. Until The Lion Tells the Story… is an invitation to embrace the wisdom and knowledge of Africa as an essential part of being in the world, and a reminder that the journey towards renaissance and transformation begins with building one’s inner pyramid.

Revolver, choreographed and performed by Kathy Westwater (NY) with Lance Gries (NY), speaks to existential threat from super-catastrophes, bound by the subtext that dance itself causes pain.

On Saturday, March 1 at 7:30 pm, there will be a performance of Molly Lieber & Eleanor Smith’s Body Comes Apart.

Body Comes Apart is a collage of dance, monologue, teaching fake workout classes, telling real and fake stories of the artists’ pasts, and speaking to themselves as children. There is shedding and trying on; clothes become analogous to history. Language becomes a vehicle for representation and a gateway to performing enlivened imagination. As they implicate themselves and the audience with mirrors, Lieber and Smith implicate fantasies forced upon them and derived from them with the text. Followed by a post-show conversation with these New York-based artists. Note: This performance contains nudity.

Dance workshops with festival artists expand audiences’ understanding of contemporary movement-based performance and build dancers’ skills. Kathy Westwater and Lance Gries teach Shakewalk; Lacina Coulibaly teaches West African Dance; Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud teach Break Every Rule; Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith teach Collaborative Feminist Strategies for Dance. These workshops will take place Saturday, March 1 & Sunday, March 2 from 10 am – 1:30 pm.

Motion State Dance Festival will take place February 26 – March 2 at Wilbury Theatre Group in Providence, RI. Tickets are $20-$30. Visit www.motionstatearts.org for tickets and more information.

Kathy Westwater & Lance Gries. Photo Maria Baranova