The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging 

Tuesday, April 2, 2024, 6:00pm – 8:00pm | Invitation only

How can we get the world that we deserve – one that works for everyone? This question and others centering notions of community and connections to place lies at the heart of the Belonging Conversation Community Gathering. Designed to bring together an intergenerational and inclusive group of D.C.-metro residents, this community gathering creates a brave and courageous space to explore the topic of belonging from multiple entry points and perspectives, and to illuminate how we are connected through shared stories.

Facilitated by artist-activist Helanius J. Wilkins, this is part of an ongoing art and social justice-based work called The Conversations Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging. It is a multi-year, multi-outcome work that celebrates and confronts heritage, resiliency, justice and hope. Colorado-based artist Wilkins will travel to all 50 U.S. states/D.C./5 inhabited territories to make and share this work, stitching together a dance-quilt to broaden our understandings of what it means to be American and sew ourselves together anew.

https://www.helaniusj.com/the-conversation-series

FRAMEWORK: A Contemporary Technique Practice

Friday, April 5, 2024, 6:30pm – 8:00pm in the Cafritz Theater | FREE

FRAMEWORK, an evolving practice developed by Helanius J. Wilkins, is a rigorous practice that transforms technique class into a laboratory for examining, exploring, and discovering bodily movements in real time. Informed by architectural concepts, the joy of daring dance is experienced through the activity of framing and re-framing structures where individual and collective discoveries can be made. Structures, cued by action narratives that serve as a guide for participants, meld notions of space together with ways of communicating through the body.

FRAMEWORK, as a movement technique, is a viscerally charged ongoing practice, resembling a ritual that employs recovery through activity. Specific design, time, and effort modules are built resulting in choreographic phrases and expressions. By assembling structures for students to inhabit, the ultimate goal of FRAMEWORK is to question communication, refine technical ability and artistry, and interrogate one’s interior material. When fully committed to the rigors of the work, sensory engagement can be triggered bringing these architectural spaces to life.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR CLASS

A Choreographic Ritual Presentation

Sunday, April 7, 2024, 4:00 PM on the Arts Park next to Dance Place | FREE

A free, site-based performance offering inspired by engagements with Washington, D.C. community members followed by a brief post- performance conversation.

Created & Performed by Helanius J. Wilkins in collaboration with Brandon Welch

This is the culminating event for a series of community-engagement activities collectively called Systems for Care and Repair. Each activity is connected to The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging, an ongoing and always shifting dance and social change work, confronting, and celebrating heritage, resiliency, justice, and hope. 

Colorado-based artists Wilkins will travel to all 50 U.S. states/D.C./5 inhabited territories to make and share this work, stitching together a dance-quilt to broaden our understandings of what it means to be American and sew ourselves together anew. This community engagement/creative development residency taking place April 1 – 7, 2024 in Washington, D.C. follows engagements that took place in November 2022 in D.C. and May 2023 in MD. 

This work and artist residency are made possible in part through funding from the National Performance Network (NPN).