Mile 17: A Conversation on the Labor & Love of Belonging
Join us for a free public panel & community event led by Award-Winning Choreographer Helanius J. Wilkins.
You can also RSVP by emailing Leigh with your name and number of attendees at lkargol@redlineart.org.
WHERE
RedLine Contemporary Art Center - 2350 Arapahoe Street, Denver, CO, 80205
Click below for the Live-Stream when the event starts, chat function also available during Q & A.
WHEN
Monday, January 17th, 2022
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM MST
WHAT
Award-winning choreographer and performance artist Helanius J. Wilkins is set to lead Mile 17: A Conversation on the Love & Labor of Belonging, a panel to honor and celebrate the Martin L. King Jr. holiday by creating a brave and courageous space to bring together intergenerational members of the Denver-metro area to reflect on stories that inform our sense of belonging and community today, and dreams for a better future.
This event emerges from Wilkins’s current project, The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging, a multi-year, multimedia dance work that confronts and celebrates heritage, resiliency, justice, and hope.
It’s also fueled by his practice two summers ago of walking solo - up to 16 miles a day – in protest and with purpose during the onset of COVID-19 and the repeated videos of police brutality incidents; and his ruminations on a phone call with Dr King. What would be his assessment of this time – this moment? How would Dr. King communicate the soul of our nation’s divide while also channeling pathways for actioning?
Wilkins will be joined by a panel of special guests including duet-partner A. Ryder Turner, R. Alan Brooks (Writer/Educator), Marissa Volpe (Chief of Equity & Engagement, History Colorado), Erika Righter (Owner, Artist, HopeTank), and Chrissy Deal (Director, Livingston Fellowship Program, Arts & Social Change Grantmaking), who will engage community-participants in a conversation centering topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion and social activism/artivism.
No stranger to blurring the lines between art and social justice, he knows no limits when it comes to pushing boundaries and creating spaces to illuminate an “American” identity as one that’s shaped by hybridity, resilience, and co-existence.
RSVP
Masks will be required for all attendees regardless of vaccination status and social distancing will be encouraged.
To ensure public safety during the Covid-19 crisis, RedLine is requesting all attendees to RSVP below.
For those unable to attend the in-person program, RedLine will be offering a streaming link to all RSVP’d attendees via email.
You can also RSVP by emailing Leigh with your name and number of attendees at lkargol@redlineart.org.
More About The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging
A multi-year venture, The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging will feature new choreographies, a documentary film, and a digital archive of the process and performance. The work will bring together artists, humanitarians, social justice activists, DEI&SJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Social Justice) consultants, and, most central, members of diverse, intergenerational communities across the nation.
The work centers on an interracial, male duet that preferences the value of bodies coexisting - sharing weight and responsibility, dancing to become better ancestors. As they travel to make and share this work, they will stitch together a dance-quilt to broaden our understandings of what it means to be American and sew ourselves together anew.
The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging is an ongoing and always shifting dance-quilt, confronting and celebrating heritage, resiliency, justice, and hope.
The multi-year work will require Wilkins travel to all 50 U.S. states/D.C./5 inhabited territories and realize multiple media outcomes in and WITH communities (e.g. Indigenous, People of Culture, Black and white, QTBIPOC/LGBTQIA+ and heteronormative, adults and youth, mixed abilities) in diverse geographic areas – rural, urban, mountain/resort, small town, suburban.
Mile 17: A Conversation on the Love & Labor of Belonging is an expansion of the community-engagement activities (Systems for Care & Repair) from which Wilkins and his duet-partner, A. Ryder Turner, are working in and WITH communities across America to stitch our country back together again and action a way for becoming better ancestors.
More About Helanius J. Wilkins
Lafayette, Louisiana native and Boulder, Colorado transplant, Helanius J. Wilkins is a choreographer, performance artist, educator, and innovator who lives in a country where, not even for a moment, is he allowed to forget he is Black. Wilkins's creative research and projects are rooted in the interconnections of American contemporary performance, cultural history, and identities of Black men.
His projects examine the raced dancing body and ways ritual can access knowledge. He uses remembering to piece together and liberate Black identity through performance.
Having choreographed 60+ works, honors include Pola Nirenska Award for Contemporary Achievement in Dance (DC’s highest honor, given by the Washington Performing Arts Society, 2008); Kennedy Center Local Dance Commissioning Project (2002 & 2006). Foundations/organizations including National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project, National Performance Network (NPN), DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Boulder County Arts Alliance (BCAA) and the Boulder Office of Arts & Culture Public Arts Program have supported his work.
He founded and artistically directed D.C.-based EDGEWORKS Dance Theater, an all-male dance company predominantly of African American men that toured nationally and internationally (2001 - 2014). He is Associate Chair and a Professor of Dance at CU Boulder.
He is a member of the National Board of Directors of the American College Dance Association (ACDA) for the Northwest region and was appointed in 2018 by Governor Jared Polis to the Colorado Council on Creative Industries. https://www.helaniusj.com/
