Arts

Urbanity Dance Announces 2022-2023 Season

by Urbanity Dance
Thursday Sep 22, 2022

Photo courtesy of Urbanity.
Photo courtesy of Urbanity.  

Urbanity Dance—dedicated to inspiring, engaging and empowering the Boston community through the art of dance and movement—today announces programming for its 2022-2023 Professional Company season, featuring collaborations with numerous Boston-area institutions.

Kicking off Urbanity's eleventh season is Call of Courage on Friday, October 21, 2022 at 6:00pm. Held at Roxbury Community College, the 45-minute performance for all ages features choreography set to powerful stories of perseverance from Boston's youth. The dancers will play with power structures rooted in social interaction to create an immersive story of empowerment and peer intervention. Performed by the Professional Company and Boston Arts Academy students, the event is a collaboration between Boston Arts Academy Dance Program Students and Brighter Boston Students, who participate in all aspects of the production, both onstage and behind the scenes. All artists will weave stories through choreography to an original sound score by local composer Rob Hyde, which centers the voices and writings from The Max Warburg Courage Curriculum. A matinee show on the same day at 12:00pm will also be presented for Boston-area school students.

Urbanity presents Of the Ether at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center on Friday, March 24 and Saturday, March 25, 2022 at 7:00pm featuring the Professional Company in a creative collaboration on the concept of the "ether" among Company Director Meg Anderson, the Urbanity Dance Choreography Fellow, and MASARY Studios. The creative team, along with the dancers, will aim to create not just a performance, but an immersive experience for the audience.

Urbanity's signature dance crawl event, featuring the Professional Company and numerous community collaborations, returns in spring 2023, entitled Go stop listen. Still wait go. Performances will take place on two weekends: Friday, May 12 and Saturday, May 13, 2023, and Friday, May 19 and Saturday, May 20, 2023 at locations throughout Boston's South End. This innovative performance brings together the talent of Boston movers, musicians, storytellers, and poets as they dive into the many layers of history in Boston's South End neighborhood, uniting dance with original scores from Boston favorites. Collaborating artists Tim Hall and Valerie Stephens join the crawl, with Hall an award winning musician and performance poet from Detroit, MI, whose poetry draws inspiration from his lived experiences, charting the nuances of blackness, masculinity, and the beauties of life, and Stephens an award-winning performing artist and arts educator who has received the Bridge Award in Arts for creating the annual event PRINCESS DAY: Celebrating Little Girls of Color. Go stop listen. Still wait go. will begin at 1511 Washington Street and continue to various different locations, each activated by dance and music. Show times will take place every five minutes from 6:00 to 7:30pm. Audience members (up to 6 per group) can participate together, creating a special memory with a uniquely-designed experience for the entire group.

"As we step into our next decade at Urbanity Dance, we are focusing on providing meaningful work for local dancers and choreographers, collaborating across artistic disciplines, and supporting artists early on in their career. We want artists to find a home in Boston," says Urbanity Dance Founder and Director Betsi Graves. "Site-specific work like our annual dance Crawl shines a light on the stylistic and cultural diversity of our neighborhood in the South End, and this fall's performance of Call of Courage is designed to physicalize empathy and promote upstander behavior for young people."

Deeply committed to collaboration and providing opportunities for the community, Urbanity's 22-23 season highlights Boston-based artists and choreographers, bringing the organization's focus to the local level in contrast to the impressive national scope it has commanded in past seasons.

In addition to its Professional Company programming, Urbanity continues to offer a wide array of dance classes for children ages 1 to 18 and works to ensure that students have equitable opportunities to participate in dance education through its Access for All Scholarship Fund. The organization also offers a full array of classes for adults in both session and drop-in formats.

Urbanity's impactful work in the community continues this season with its free, weekly Dance with Parkinson's classes; Movement Mends, a dance and movement workshop series that engages and empowers individuals who have experienced incarceration, housing insecurity, or abuse; and affordable studio rentals for the artistic community.

For more information, please visit www.urbanitydance.org.