Year: 2023-2024
DanceForce Member: Cynthia Williams
Partnering Member: Robin Collen
Artist: Tatiana Desardouin
Community Partner: Hobart & William Smith Colleges Dance Department, Geneva
Audience: 400
County: Ontario
October 6-14, 2023 residency of Passion Fruit Dance in Geneva, NY. The company (Tatiana Desardouin, Mai Lê Hô, and Lauriane Ogay) will arrive on Friday, October 6th and have four days of creative time in the studio to work on their current work in process Dimensions followed by community outreach: Passion Fruit Seeds, comprised of House dance workshops, Hip Hop workshop and lecture, culminating in the performance of Dance Within Your Dance. The company will also present an informal showing of Dimensions with opportunities for audience/artist question and answer.
Passion Fruit Dance Company is a Street, Club dance and educational company founded in 2016. Its mission is to promote the authenticity of street dance and clubbing styles, Hip Hop and house cultures and their black heritage, as well as its contribution to society. The company explores the human experience, addresses social issues and thrives to inspire young artists to share their voices. The company is composed of Tatiana Desardouin (Haitian & Swiss, founder, artistic director, choreographer, dancer), Lauriane Ogay (Swiss, core member, dancer) and Mai Lê Hô (French-Vietnamese, core member, dancer).
We are delighted to present the company’s signature outreach program, Passion Fruit Seeds. PFS is a series of socially engaged and educational programs, developed utilizing mainly the prism of hip-hop and house dance to uplift audiences. Those programs incorporate antiracism and inclusivity work. There are three separate programs within PFS, which capitalize on the socioemotional impacts of dance therapy, preserve hip hop history, and support the Black community. These programs are intended to support and provide tools to anyone in their healing process, empower the Black community through representation of black people in the arts and offer a safe space for expression. This series of workshops will strengthen the HWS anti-racist work and connect us to new communities.
In the performance piece, Dance Within Your Dance, Tatiana Desardouin invites connection with the techniques, rhythms and essence of hip-hop and house dance. This work shows how, in these communities, we develop, struggle, connect, and create our own and collective signatures. Developed during Dance Your Future residency and premiered at BAAD!Theater in 2017, the piece includes a lecture/Q&A inviting the audience to have a conversation about race. Using “an introspective seed” – a tool designed by Tatiana to start an introspective anti-racist work – Tatiana, Mai Lê and Lauriane will share their perspective, as well as their motivation and process to do socially engaged art projects. We are excited to showcase such cutting edge Hip-Hop and House dance in our venue.
The company’s creative time will focus on further development of Dimensions. The piece has multiple layers, including interrelated performative and visual components such as motion capture, projections, animation, live music, painting, photography and seeks to explore questions of identity through movement, images, and choreography. We are enthusiastic about engaging with the company in the development of this new work and to be partners in this creative endeavor.