workinonit deluxe edition

Workinonit: Deluxe Edition
June 1 | 7:30 pm  
$12 online | $15 at the door
The Performance Garage
1515 South Brandywine St. Philadelphia, PA 19130

Workinonit came into existence last summer as a way to build community with many of the amazing artists in residence applicants. Vince and I feel we have a responsibility to our community to share our in-demand resources with artists on the come up. Workinonit Deluxe Edition will be the fourth iteration of this works-in-progress cabaret. In place of of the usual in studio process showings, this Workinonit is a showcase of complete work making it's first baby steps into the big, bright world. We're taking a field trip to the Performance Garage (a hip venue much fancier than it sounds) to share a killer line up of dance theater performances that, frankly, you won't see in combination anywhere else in Philadelphia. I've built this show also as a space to share some of my new work, created in collaboration with dancers who take classes at UMA. I'm pretty stoked to share my latest; it involves Ravel's "Bolero" and is performed by Amalia Colon Nava, Caitlin Green, Evelyn Langley, Chelsea Murphy, Lillian Ransijn, Dylan Smythe, and Mary Carmen Webb. I'm also tossing a tidbit from my large scale/ long term project called Wolfthicket. 
Critical ingredients to UMA's secret sauce are my co-workers Laurel Card and Adriana Imhof. They will both be sharing material at Workinonit. They both have the patience and focus to teach in our kids hip hop program (MoveMakers). Laurel holds down all things grown and Salsa. Adriana runs our social media platforms. She also works for Hip Hop Fundamentals and has been training in house and breaking with some of Philly's finest.. I'm sure you've see them around the studio. What you probably haven't seen is the hours they put into their own practices, ever finding and molding their relationship to their respective styles. Laurel's Solo Salsa class will be demo-ing material from class. And I've convinced Adriana to celebrate graduating from Temple by performing. 
If that wasn't enough, the rest of the line up is epic. Several performers who are connected to UMA in various ways are coming through with new material, fresh and flavorful. Comedienne Jenna Horton, emerging from the winter soil with spring in her step, brings us “Dale”. Helen Noland lights the stage on fire with kaleidoscopic hip hop choreography. From Brooklyn, Sarah Chein brings adventurous improvisations that fly across the floor. Major Curl (Julia Davis) will do something that merits the adjective "titillating." We just added Camille Gamble to the mix. With many additional surprise performers in the mix, as well as the heartwarming showings of some of UMA's adult Salsa students, Workinonit: Deluxe Edition is the perfect thing to do before whatever else it is you do on a Saturday night.
See you there!
- Lily

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Jenna Horton as "Dale"

Camille Gamble. Photo: Terrell Halsey

Sarah Chien. Photo: Alessandro Grandini

Helen Noland

Lily Kind with student dancers

About the flyer design: The sources image can be found in the Vancouver Sun Archives. It is from a 1935 advertisement for "Brown Skin Models", a black vaudeville revue that played the Strand Theatre in 1935. The vaudeville industry, predominantly white owned and dependent upon racist minstrel tropes, was mostly gone by the thirties. However, vaudeville laid the bedrock for popular entertainment in America in music, film, and theater. The racism of this legacy has not been erased with time. Simultaneously, scholars Jayna Brown, Sadiya Hartman, and Daphne Brooks have demonstrated how the vaudeville circuit was also a site of artistic (and gender) expression that afforded female POC performers an economic agency otherwise made unavailable by dominant racist economics and politics at the local, state, and national level. The women of vaudeville were not just passive receptacles of some fucked up shit, but actively used the vaudeville stage as site for satire, subversion, rapture, competition, and joyful re-telling and re-claiming of the possibilities for female and non-binary performers in America. I am inspired by the resilience of these women. Moreover, the vaudeville circuit was the counter point to 'high-culture' and concert dance, which was an aristocratic tradition in origin. In producing conglomerate shows for UMA, I feel we are working in the lineage of vaudeville.