Past Projects
Projects
Good Foot Dance Company explores the complex cultural twinings of the root-system of American vernacular dance, and raise questions about connectivity, continuity, and social responsibility.
Same Differents, 2015 - 2016
A collaboration with Kwame Opare, commission for the Brooklyn Ballet's 2015 Season, featured in Rhythmically Speaking Dance in Minnneapolis, MN in August of 2015, and at the Dance Flurry in Saratoga Springs, NY in 2016.
The Meaning of Buck Dance, 2013 - 2016
From Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Website: "Directed by D.C. choreographer Emily Oleson, this work features Urban Artistry with Good Foot Dance Company and Baakari Wilder. The piece investigates the origins behind the term “buck dance,” which in tap dance history is used to describe an early American percussive dance style. Drawing on a short video of buck dance taken by Thomas Edison in 1894, the dancers use the technique of freestyling to compare different dance styles in conversation. Part of Local Dance Commissioning Project."
Millennium Stage, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, September 19 & September 20, 2013.
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This work was also made possible by generous permission by the Smithsonian Folkways and the National Museum of American History's Ernie Smith Jazz Collection to use clips, including interviews with and dancing by John D. Holeman, Friz Holloway, and Algia Mae Hinton collected by Mike Seeger and Ruth Pershing, and by many dancers giving interviews including Marico "Dr. Rico" Flake, Nic Gareiss, and Ira Bernstein. This project toured the Ural region of Russia in the summer of 2014 as a US State Department Arts Envoy, among other engagements.
Vaudevival: Old is the new New, 2011 - 2012
Vaudevival: Old is the new New is a “Trad” dance theater project that ricochets through pockets of twentieth-century popular entertainment to create a vibrant statement about the cyclical nature of art and society. My MFA Thesis Concert at Univserity of Maryland, College Park, the accompanying paper lays a theoretical framework for research that is detailed in my research blog: www.vaudevival.com. Both the written and performance portions view American vernacular dance through the lens of Critical Race theory in order to dismantle unwieldy categories in Dance Studies in higher education. Envisioning a creative utopia free of exploitative hierarchies – both on the stage and on the page, Vaudevival invokes the old to reinvent the new through the intertextuality of American dances, bringing scholarship to the theater, and bringing some theater to scholarship. This performance featured live music by Joseph "Joebass" DeJarnette, Sarah Alden, Aimee Curl, Jabari Exum, Lydia Martin, and Greg C. Adams, and in its second incarnation, guest appearances by Baakari Wilder and Urban Artistry.
Shentai, 2007 & Wunderkammer, 2006
Local Arts Carnivals in the derelict IX warehouse in Charlottesville, VA, Good Foot Dance Company appeared as the Tap Dancing Vampirates, Unusual Creatures, burlesque, trapeze, Human Gumball Machine, cast of firedances and other various and sundry performance and production tasks.
