Concourse

“Concourse,” created by choreographers Barbie Diewald and Shakia Barron, is a dance project that extends the duet form.  Barron and Diewald facilitate a live dialogue in performance, joined by their mentors and emerging artists who are former students. Bringing vision and legacy into conversation at the level of the body, this confluence creates an intergenerational community of inquiry, and affirms that mentorship is multidirectional: we glean as much from our mentees as from our mentors.  Concourse celebrates the feedback loops that occur when we collapse the distinctions between self, student, teacher, and material.

“Concourse” is shaped by its creators’ creative and ancestral bibliographies. Barron draws on African diasporic street and club styles, and Diewald works within western concert dance and postmodern practice. Created in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, In a moment of isolation and rupture, “Concourse” looks back as it looks forward, revises as it re-imagines. In this spirit, Barron and Diewald invited their own mentors Rennie Harris, David Dorfman and Jennifer Nugent, into the process to provide provocations and support. The cast comprised six emerging dance professionals who have had both Diewald and Barron as their college professors.

This work was funded, in part, by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New Work New England Grant, Mount Holyoke College’s Racial Equity in Research and Action Grant, and the South Hadley Cultural Council.

Dancers: Amisi Nazaire-Hicks, Sienna Jessurun, Miranda Lawson, Katherine Kain, Sara Maurer, Soukeyna Abbott

Sound by Jazer Giles
Rehearsal Assistant: Laura Rosenstone
Videography by Nel Shelby Productions