Dimensions Dance Theater, the oldest Black dance troupe on the West Coast, celebrates its 50th anniversary with performances Oct. 22-23 in Oakland.
As an art form based on moving bodies through space there’s something deeply satisfying about artistic director Deborah Vaughan celebrating Dimension Dance Theater’s 50th anniversary in Mills College’s Lisser Hall. The two-night engagement Oct. 22-23 completes a circle that brings Vaughan back to the campus where the longest running Black dance company on the West Coast was born.
When Vaughan co-founded Dimensions Dance Theater in 1972 with Elendar Barnes and Shirley Brown, who were also Beckford’s students, the Black Arts movement was cresting and they sought to create works that connected African Americans to kindred diaspora cultures across the Caribbean and the motherland.
The 50th anniversary program embodies that mission with new works by Dimensions collaborators Laura Elaine Ellis and Liberian choreographer Nimely Napla . The latest iteration of Ellis’ “ruminations. visited” speaks to the company’s resilience at a particularly challenging time.
Last spring she reconceived the piece as a site-specific work in San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project Atrium with Tiersa Nureyev’s textile-art costumes. And now she’s reimagined it again for the proscenium setting of the historic Lisser Hall featuring 10 dancers and text recited by poets Jordon E. Dabney and Atiya Ziyad. The collaboration with Dimensions builds on a relationship forged over more than three decades.
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