JFD at Waterfront Park

Jane Franklin Dance performance in response to Temporary Public Art Installation “Two Boxes of Oranges and Admonia Jackson” by Nina Cooke John The City of Alexandria’s Office of the Arts is pleased to announce that it was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund its community Artist Residency Program. The Artist Residency Program integrates visual and performing artists in the community to conduct interactive art engagements at the Waterfront Park public art initiative Site See. As part of the Artist Residency Program, Jane Franklin Dance was selected to bring interpretive movement pieces inspired by the artwork to the Waterfront Park. Highlighted by spoken word, Jane Franklin’s Shake interweaves dance with spoken word poetry by Bennie Herron. In Drums, performers accumulate through movement, rhythm and cadence and celebrate during interjected slices of silence. In part II a trio vibrates with the joy of electric energy. Spoken word by artist Bennie Herron adds memory to the narrative as three poems, “Connected,” “Powdered Milk,” “Summertime '' bring forward images of childhood. “Herron’s verse style is informed in part by the socially conscious Hip Hop artists of the 1990s and poets of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s, among a myriad of other sources.” (Shake was premiered in Feb 2023 at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for the visual art exhibition Bennie Herron: Origin Stories) Inspired by the installation by Nina Cooke John for Waterfront Park, Jane Franklin Dance explores the boundaries of the architecture and the layered history it represents through movement, dance, and spoken word. “Archaeologists exploring the Alexandria waterfront in 2015 and 2018, in advance of the ongoing redevelopment, discovered the remains of four vessels that were sunk on the Potomac mudflats in the latter part of the 18th-century as part of a process to extend Alexandria's shoreline.” A manifest lists people and commodities on a ship that came or left from the Port of Alexandria in 1792. Words from the ships’ manifest appear on the orange lines in the installation and on the vertical elements that directly work with the proportions of the body. Dancers respond. Movement activates the installation revealing a hint of a fuller truth, “imaging what it could have been like being outside of that hull, outside of that space of history, or outside of that time and looking back.” Nina Cooke John

Event Links

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2003702-0

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