Right now, Pangea World Theater is honored to be hosting Leslie Parker for her artist residency developing an extraordinary project, Call to Remember.
In a few short days, September 10-11, at 7:00 PM, you will have the opportunity to experience the public facing event from this residency. This showing is part of the development process for Call to Remember; an uprising of real stories embedded deep within the subconscious, a moment to imagine freedom where Blackness is the future.
Click here for more information to attend this event!
Read more to hear from Leslie herself about this work:
I’m excited about the opportunity to work with Pangea World Theater again. It’s been a few years. I think the last time I worked with Pangea was doing teaching workshops in movement back in 2016. To land back in the Twin Cities, my hometown, and reconnect in this way has been awesome.
I feel very grateful for this opportunity, knowing that we’re going through a pandemic, and so many things that are happening in the world right now can cause a lot of angst, anxiety and dissonance. I am able to walk into the Pangea World Theater space and find an opportunity to search, and ask questions, and move through them in my body — and just locate myself. Not for anyone or anything else, but for myself, so that I am present.
It’s important to me to be as present as I can, knowing that that presence can be whatever it needs to be, in real time.
What really surprised me the most throughout this process was that I did not expect that the residency would end up being a time for me to focus so much on myself and my work, even though I’m in collaboration with these amazing artists, Jordan Hamilton and Bayou Bay. It has been a very nourishing experience for me and hopefully for them too.
I didn’t expect it. I really thought it would be an experience that was provided for those who are witnessing, or people who want to participate by just observing art. I’ve had very interesting conversations with Dipankar, who has been what I consider a mentor, kind of bringing me to this process of remembering.
Not only is Call to Remember about a larger framework where many people can enter and exit, and collaborate with me and with each other… It is also a place where I am remembering.
What I have found through this process is that as things are being stripped away, through the process of improvisation, both as a strategy and working with an institutional framework, and also as a dancer and as a mover, and working in collaboration with artists… I find that I’m remembering again what it means to just rely on my own body and my own presence, in real time, solely and completely. And remembering that that is enough. And that I have everything that I need.
And if that can be something that I offer to each person, to each individual: remembering that you are enough. How you are ‘housed’ in your own body, and temple, and experience, and world is enough.
Yes, we all have the right to elaborate, or to decorate, or to bring ourselves to a more flamboyant way of being. Yes, of course, I am all for that.
And at the same time remembering nothing. Remembering this space of being in the unknown. Remembering it’s ok to grieve right now, all the losses.
And to just allow those things that are peeling away, moving away, to go. To let it go and to remember that we as individuals — within this collective memory and space and being in time — are enough.
Video footage by Adriana Foreman
From Leslie Parker Dance Project's Pillsbury House Spring Residency 2021
Call to Remember is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund project co- commissioned by Pangea World Theater in partnership with Pillsbury House Theater, The Walker Art Center, Danspace Project Inc., and NPN. More information: npnweb.org.
The development of Call to Remember is funded by National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund; NPN Development Fund; and NPN Storytelling & Documentation Fund.
Leslie Parker Dance Project is also supported by MRAC flexible support and MRAC equity fund.
Live Stream co-presented by Counter Pulse and Pangea World Theater: Leslie Parker Dance Project’s Call to Remember Fall 2021 Residency.
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