Join us for Mile 18: One Year Later...A Conversation on the Labor & Love of Belonging
Award-Winning Choreographer Helanius J. Wilkins & Writer/Community Organizer John B. Smith Discuss Belonging & Dreams for a Better Future on Martin L. King Jr. Day.
WHEN
Monday, January 16, 4-6pm
WHERE
RedLine Contemporary Art Center, 2350 Arapahoe St, Denver, CO, 80205. The event will also be streamed live on RedLine’s Instagram and Facebook.
WHAT
RedLine presents choreographer, performance artist, and artivist (artist-activist) Helanius J. Wilkins in conversation with Atlanta-based writer, Black power advocate, and community organizer John Burl Smith for Mile 18: One Year Later…A Conversation on the Labor & Love of Belonging, a FREE community event that honors and celebrates the Martin L. King Jr. holiday.
This event honors and continues last year’s Mile 17: A Conversation on the Labor & Love of Belonging conversation from a different perspective. It aims to create 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 The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging – a multi-year, multi-outcome multimedia dance work that confronts and celebrates heritage, resiliency, justice, and hope.
It is also fueled by his practice 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 last summer; and his ruminations on if Dr. King could make a phone call to him, 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?
A lively conversation between Wilkins and Smith, who personally knew Dr. King, it will traverse themes of diversity, equity, and inclusion and social activism/artivism. No stranger to blurring the lines between art and social justice, Wilkins 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.
The event will include a Q & A segment with audience-participants.
About John B. Smith
John Burl Smith began as a Black Power advocate in 1967 and now works for social change, social justice, and other progressive causes. He is a writer, black power advocate and community organizer, hailing from Memphis, based in Atlanta. He holds a BA in psychology and is the author of The 400th: From Slavery to Hip Hop, published by River House Publishing in 2021.
VIDEO: John B. Smith recalls the march in Memphis >
Smith is also featured in the documentary The Invaders (2015). Beyond inspired by militant black leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, a new, radicalized generation of civil rights activists made up of young college students, Vietnam vets, musicians, and intellectuals emerged in Memphis in 1967.
The Invaders espoused Black Power and, when pushed, did not limit themselves to non-violence. Prichard Smith uncovers the history and significance of the often- overlooked group, detailing their surprising behind-the-scenes involvement with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the pivotal days leading up to his assassination.
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’ 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 NEA, NEFA National Dance Project, National Performance Network (NPN), DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, 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.
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 18: One Year Later…A Conversation on the Labor & Love 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.
