I've got a tape I wanna play is surreal celebration of music and its slippery role in daily life. Together with dancers Chelsea Murphy, Chloe Marie, Elizabeth Weinstein, Maddie Hopfield and Dylan Smythe, Kind has woven together a series of vignettes dedicated to the unexpected bookmarks songs place in the pages of our lives. Produced by Philadelphia Dance Projects.
Photos: Jano Cohen
“As much fun as you can have in an hour of dance"
“Eclectic and hilarious”
“...postmodern feeling, informed by contemporary dance but set apart from it by a loose, improvisational style and an eclectic mix of social and jazz dance”
Philadelphia Dance Projects presents Lily Kind’s I’ve got a tape I wanna play
Lily practices & teaches Flying Low & Passing Through, the joyful, collective, contemporary floorwork + improvisation methods of David Zambrano.
Vernacular Jazz aka Solo Jazz aka Authentic Jazz aka African American Vernacular Jazz aka Jazz Roots, refers to black vernacular dances styles ranging from Cake Walk and Charleston through to Be-bop and early rock and roll. Unlike Broadway Jazz, it has limited influences from ballet. It sometimes, but not always, indicates dancing without a partner (rather than dancing with a partner, like Lindy Hop). Solo Jazz can be improvised or choreographed. It ranges from sly and slinky to aerobic and goofy.
Lindy Hop was is a vernacular jazz dance created by working class Afro-American people in Harlem in the 1930's. Lindy Hop, variously known as swing dance or even “the Jitterbug” is danced with a partner to classic big band music, swampy New Orleans jazz, or even Motown.
I started Lindy Hopping in 2009 in Baltimore. I was invited to train with Gaurdian Baltimore which encouraged my anthropological thinking about social dance forms in the 21st century. After attending many swing dance events and festivals all over the world, including Stompology, Herrang, ILHC, and more I created Ragtag Empire with Heather Houde in 2017. We host parties, teach classes, and share history. Today, Ragtag works is a sub-program of Urban Movemenet Arts, as well as independently producing events and parties.
My academic research interests are focused on jazz in the vaudeville era, particularly Ida Forsyne as well as the influence of jazz on the advent of the ballroom dance industry and ‘Modern’ dance.
www.ragtagempire.com
photo credits: Jerry Almonte (color) Tyler Sakil (black and white)
DOWNLOAD PDF PLAYBILL/BIBLIOGRAPHY
Press for 2021 Performance in Philadelphia: Broad St. Review | thinkingDance
Wolfthicket plays with the traditions, rituals, and fantasies of the 'girls games' we grew up with (or didn’t), and how they hop and skip across time and place.
The methods and materials of this dance come from the hand clapping games, recess activities, make-believe, and satires of intertwining US American folk traditions. The show is a modular set of improvisations that I have been developing since 2015, but a lot changed between the 2015 version and the 2021 version. In the 2021 version sampling, chorus refrains, accumulation, percussion, and call and response power the music, the dancing, the set, the world. An experiment in citing the omnipresence of Afro Diasporic influence on pop culture, the show includes a playbill turned bibliography.
The cast is approaching and leaving our thirties. The conventional dance theater world does not often positively embrace aging, both theoretically and materially. But for us, watching, healing, and helping each other as we age, lends the show maturity, humor, and perspective. What I did not predict at the start of the work, but has become braided into the show as life comes at us, is the relationship between performance and care-taking.
Wolfthicket is a mobile and modular in format, adaptable to various venues. It invites the audience to applaud, cheer, or heckle.
Wolfthicket has been performed in excerpt or in full:
August 2021 at Mertz Gall, Philadelphia, PA
Feb 2020 at the Table Gallery in Chicago, IL
June 2019 at Workinonit Deluxe, Performance Garage, Philadelphia, PA.
April 2019 at Dollop: Works in Progress, hosted by Subcircle, Philadelphia, PA.
The former version:
February 2016: Martial Posture, Philadelphia, PA (now Urban Movement Arts)
November 2015. Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company.
Past & present thicket performers: Amalia Colón-Nava , Johanna Kasimow, Maddie Hopfield, Kelsey Lanceta, Evelyn Langley, Chelsea Murphy, Lillian Ransijn, Dylan Smythe, Eva Steinmetz, Mary Carmen Webb, Elizabeth Weinstein as well as the members of the Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company.
Yeah, I made a dance to one of the most iconic pieces of classical music of all time. And it’s fucking awesome.
photos: Terrell Halsey, from the premiere of Bolero at Workinonit: Deluxe.
dancers: Amalia Colon Nava, Cait Green, Chelsea Murphy, Lillian Ransijn, Evelyn Langley, Mary Carmen Webb, Lily Kind
‘bolero’ is a 25 min performance featuring 4- 8 dancers and can be performed in traditional stage space as well as on any large, open, floor surface.
“Provocation & Delight” - Thinking Dance
“Truly a Gem” - Philadelphia Dance
Sept 2018. Philadelphia Fringe Festival
Metal is unexpectedly soft. Kind is unabashedly sharp. Together, they present a collage of new solo work designed for folks secretly underwhelmed by new solo work. Metal and Kind are both multidisciplinary powerhouses working in and around social and folk dance, devised dance theater, and experimental storytelling.
Available as excerpts or in full. Can be mounted in non-traditional theater and dance spaces.
Black American Popular Dance: Selected Reading List
I think what kinds of dances we teach, and how we teach them, is important. I teach forms and techniques, that, like me, are both Inside and Outside of the dominant norms of the dance industry. I’m interested in lineage, source, and midrash, the Jewish practice of critical commentary on and around a historical text.
In the history classroom, the dance studio, and on stage, I prioritize teaching skills and strategies to help students grow as people, dancers, and community members. My work is powered by my continuous learning about the social history behind forms of dance and seeking to uplift the intersection of history, identity, and performance. I give young dancers and thinkers tools to identify cultural hegemonies/power structures and the means to joyfully express themselves outside of the status quo.
My focus on the diasporic, the folk, the vernacular, the improvised, and the collective, is emboldened by an academic and artistic study of the nation, the classical, the canon, and the codified. Our pedagogy is just as critical as our content as a technology of power.
Moreover, as both a clown and a jazz dancer, I quite literally teach dancers to talk; to speak up, to sing together, and to scat their own songs. I teach not only in lines, but in circles, processions, and partnerships, to support various modes of learning in the studio and in the classroom.
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In the black vernacular, mimicry, musicality, expressiveness, and performing for the group offer built-in learning and teaching tools. I use them to teach vernacular jazz. These same tools are central to how I teach Flying Low & Passing Through, in alignment with the teaching methods of the technique originator David Zambrano, with whom I have trained extensively. I teach Zambrano’s work not as a disciple, but rather as a critical enthusiast.
- Mimicry or ‘following’ teaches listening and one-ups-man-ship, without relying on spoken language. Mimicry, especially in relationship to rhythm and style, can become a tool for collectivity.
- Scatting and singing teach how to map movement into a groove. They are aural tools for self-evaluation without a mirror. Access to the voice facilitates access to one's whole body.
- Each-One-Teach-One: Students work peer to peer to troubleshoot material together. Each-one-teach-one also embodies pedagogical responsibility as each student becomes responsible for knowing how to transmit the material to another.
- Center of Attention: Encircling a student with the full class’ attention to witness a student perform material, or articulate a question. The dancer performing for the group is practicing performance under pressure, like in a jam/cypher, as well as the skill of incorporating feedback on the spot. This practice normalizes struggling to ‘get it.’ While it can be scary at first, it becomes a powerful learning opportunity and builds more compassionate and articulate dancers and teachers.
Collaborative dance-making with young people — undergraduates or high schoolers — can be transformative and empowering for the participants and the audience. I care about the cultural capital (stories, references, friendships) young people carry. I am passionate about using this material in an environment of consent and creativity to express something new, and usually, quite hilarious and profound.
Photos courtesy of Concord Academy (Cole +Kiera Photography) and California Institute of the Arts.
How To Make A Dance In America is a manual that outlines the basics of making and producing dance in the USA. You may be wondering: what is the difference between a DMX & an XLR cable? Or: How do I budget and make a rehearsal schedule for my independently produced dance show? Or generally: Is it possible to be a DIY dance maker?
I got you.
This ‘zine came out of over a decade of producing my own dances in whatever weird, wonderful space I could get my hands on, mostly in Baltimore and Philly, 2008-2021. I was unwilling to wait for major funding or to censor my ideas to fit within the available presenting platforms. Shout out to Effervescent Collective and Urban Movement Arts, the grassroots organizations where I was able to develop and share my DIY skills.
The good folks at Voxel Theater in Baltimore helped me turn it into a digital resource. Every once in a while I re-print a hardcopy batch of the 'zine.
(If you ask nice I might send you a PDF to print it as a booklet at home.)
2009 - 2015 | Baltimore, MD
“Effervescent bridges the city’s burgeoning DIY performance and music scenes with collaborations as inclusive as they are kinetic.”
— Baltimore Magazine, Best of Baltimore, 2012
As the founding director of Effervescent Collective, I supported the creation of way-more-than-we-kept-track-of-number of original full evening dance works, dance parties, pop-up performances, and more. Effervescent was a volunteer based organization full of a believe in Baltimore, each other, and the nourishing power of making dance.
My choreographic world is influenced by music videos of the 1990s. Saturated colors, playfulness, utopian-retro-futurism, sampling, satire, and vaudevillian performance tricks — all coming from hip hop, punk, and pop culture — are aesthetic and attitudes I first encountered in the golden age of music videos, long before I studied them formally in school.
