taisha paggett and WXPT in collaboration with Ashley Hunt & Kim Zumpfe: The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People
Public classes: Saturdays, May 2016, 1–5pm
DiverseWorks
3400 Main Street
Houston, TX 77002
Hours: Wednesday–Thursday noon–6pm,
Friday–Saturday noon–8pm
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, developed by Los Angeles-based taisha paggett and WXPT in collaboration with Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe, is a large-scale installation and performance platform that acts as a dance school. The School… responds to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds amidst the evolving violence against Black bodies, gentrification, and the persistent erasure of communities of color throughout history. The School… was inspired by the now-demolished CB Dansby Colored High School, believed to have been founded in the early 1900s by ancestors of paggett in East Texas.
Comprised of a variety of architectural interventions, choreographic portraits, videos, slide projections, and sculptural objects, the gallery space is set up as a dance studio and classroom with artworks as learning tools. This multidisciplinary platform is built from the dance company WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), which uses dance moves, protest forms, weight exchange, concealment strategies, and the everyday movement vocabularies of survival and celebration that structure Black and queer life. All of these ideas inform this project’s central research question: What is a Black dance curriculum today? Considering a reversed path of The Great Migration—when millions of African-Americans left the rural South for the West, North, and Midwest—this project began in Los Angeles, traveled to Austin, and is now present in Houston.
taisha paggett is a dance artist, choreographer, and educator; Ashley Hunt is an image-maker, writer, and educator; Kim Zumpfe is an artist, educator, and sculptor; WXPT is an intentional community in the form of a dance company.
WXPT Houston: Joy Angela Anderson, Adam Castañeda, Celestina Billington, Brittani Broussard, Caleb Fields, Maria Garcia, Rosine Kouamen, Eternal Lokumbe, Norola Morgan, Meena Murugesan, Kenneth Owens, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, and Che Ture
Throughout The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, free public classes will be held from 1 to 5pm every Saturday in May.The School’s activities include discussions, Houston company members-led workshops, wanderings, gatherings, dispersions, the lifting of people, the staging of images, and other embodied practices whose traces accumulate into a visual archive and temporary installation at DiverseWorks.
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People was first presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) curated by Robert Crouch, as a program of events, workshops, classes, and rehearsals for the final performance. The Houston iteration, organized by DiverseWorks Curator Rachel Cook, builds upon the research from LACE and extends it into a Texas context.
About DiverseWorks
DiverseWorks is a non-profit multidisciplinary art center in Houston, Texas. The mission of DiverseWorks is to commission, produce, and present new and daring art in all its forms through innovative collaborations that honor each artist’s vision without constraint.
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks in partnership with Fusebox and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People‘s presentation at DiverseWorks is made possible through support from the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
DiverseWorks Season Sponsors: The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, Houston Endowment, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is made possible by The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional funds come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This project is also sponsored by a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Development support of The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People was given through Show Box L.A.’s Los Angeles Dance & Research Residency Program, which is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, commissioning support from Clockshop for the performance evereachmore, performed at the Bowtie Project in Los Angeles, contributed to the company’s methodology.