BBC calls out for UK dance talent from all styles as it announces a BBC dance season for 2022
Both BBC Young Dancer 2022 and Dance Passion 2022 will be inviting applications including opportunities for film-making and interactive initiatives
OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE BBC One
Celebrating the best of UK dance today and engaging wide audiences, the dance season aims to showcase exciting new talent in a broad range of dance, as well as in choreography, film-making and interactivity, and to support inspiring collaborations across the sector. It will be inviting applications for BBC Young Dancer and for Dance Passion, in collaboration with the sector support organisation One Dance UK, including opportunities for five short films and five interactive projects.
Fact Residency: Julianknxx
Fact Residency: Julianknxx
Julianknxx traces an expansive and ongoing conversation between the many voices, past and present, that make up the cultural patchwork of his life.
In her beautiful and devastating 2016 book
In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, scholar Christina Sharpe delivers a stark rallying cry: “We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work.” Drawing inspiration and strength from Sharpe’s words, interdisciplinary poet Julianknxx brings together sound, image and performance in a discursive, enfleshed poetic practice. His work is deeply connected both to the foundational stories and languages of his birth place of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and to the sounds and voices of his current home in London. It is the passage between these places, and their twin histories of conflict and colonialism, that the poet seeks to document, penning what he calls a “history from below.”
Julianknxx Presents: Black Room
Julianknxx Presents: Black Room
Julianknxx and Darryl Daley explore the connections between Brutalism and Black bodies.
In Black Room, Julianknxx turns his attention to the history of Brutalist architecture, as well as its inextricable links with the history and experience of Black people living in Britain. Considering what he terms “hyper-organised living” in the city of London, the poet explores what it means to live and breathe in buildings such as Trellick Tower, Balfron Tower and Grenfell Tower, buildings he understands to symbolise a certain disconnect between Black bodies and the natural potency of the earth. “When you look at those spaces in terms of survival, what it means to live a healthy life, that connection to earth, it’s just not attainable,” he says.
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Two of the first films made in spring’s UK lockdown captured the moment of sudden confinement, DIY spirit and the simple need for connection and hope. Birmingham Royal Ballet principal Céline Gittens danced Fokine’s Dying Swan in her living room, linked up with musicians at home. Meanwhile, ex-New York City Ballet dancer Robbie Fairchild and his flatmate Chris Jarosz threw juicy shapes on their Manhattan rooftop. They brought a tear and a beaming smile, respectively. Read the full review.
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Among a number of artists addressing issues brought to the fore by Black Lives Matter this summer, Jonzi D’s Our Bodies Back was particularly powerful. It had a strong anchor in the defiant text of Detroit poet jessica Care moore, lamenting the lost lives of Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor and other black women. And it had three distinctive and potent performers: Nafisah Baba, Bolegue Manuela and the unignorable intensity of Axelle “Ebony” Munezero.