Moonshine

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courtesy Ikwe

Ikwe during a performance.

Ikwe

The Dance Department’s “Moonshine” concert is an annual highlight of UW-Madison’s Black History Month event schedule. The program features performances from the worlds of dance (Barrio Dance, Kimi McKissic, Guy Thorne, and a new work choreographed by Ja' Malik); music (Kathryn Ananda-Owens, Hanah Jon Taylor, Emery Stephens); and cross-disciplinary works including a short film by Omari Carter, a sound poem by Ikwe and Kino Galbraith, and mindfulness practice by OMAI Hip Hop Artist-in-Residence Kenji Summers. “Moonshine” is curated by Chris Walker, a Dance Department professor and director of the Division of the Arts.

media release: Moonshine 2024 Brings Campus, Community, Alumni and Students Together for Annual Black History Month Performance Celebration

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Department and Professor Chris Walker are delighted to present Moonshine, Friday, February 23, 2024, at 3:30 p.m. in the Margaret H’Doubler Performance Space, Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue. This free event is a coming together of campus, community, alumni and students in performance to celebrate Black History Month, with live music, contemporary theater and dance.  With an emphasis on belonging, this year’s program was curated in collaboration with campus and community partners, emphasizing interconnectedness and mutual support in fostering our individual and collective flourishing. 

Moonshine opens this year with masterclasses from the Ronald K. Brown / EVIDENCE Dance Company through a partnership between the Dance Department and the Wisconsin Union Theater. Leading up to Friday’s performance event, the Dance Department invites Black artists to teach currently enrolled students. In addition to Ronald K. Brown, Madison Ballet’s Ja’ Malik will also teach for the department.

Two alums will be brought back to campus for the performance event, Brooklyn-based artist and former First Wave Scholar (from the first cohort) Ikwe (formerly known as Kelsey Pyro) and Milwaukee-based artist, and Dance graduate Kimi McKissic. Ikwe and her collaborator Kino Galbraith will present MAKADEWIIYAASIKWE, a sound poem of original music and personal stories that connect the history and healing process of Native American and African American people. McKissic will present a solo dance work.

Guest artists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts (OMAI) Initiatives and the Mead Witter School of Music will also be on the program. OMAI’s Hip Hop Artist-in-Residence Kenji Summers will engage the audience and performers in a mindfulness practice to close the program. Summers is a contemplative artist, certified mindfulness instructor and attention activist based in Brooklyn. 

Two members of the St. Olaf faculty, who are guest artists of the Mead Witter School of Music, American baritone Emery Stephens and pianist Kathryn Ananda-Owens will also perform. 

The Dance Department’s newest member of the faculty, Omari Carter, will present his film END OF THE BLOCK, a short film combining live dance with stickman animation that illustrates the harsh realities of going beyond your postal code. Carter is a screendance practitioner and body percussionist, formerly from London and, for the past decade, has been choreographing, teaching, and performing for music videos, film, television, and theater.

Guy Thorne, artistic director, choreographer and dancer at FuturePointe Dance, currently serving as the arts residency coordinator for the Division of the Arts, will present a solo work.

Local guest performances include Hanah Jon Taylor, owner of Cafe Coda and an internationally known jazz saxophonist & flutist,  a new solo work from Madison Ballet, choreographed by Artistic Director Ja’ Malik, and an ensemble Hip-Hop performance from Barrio Dance, choreographed by AJ Juarez.

There will be additional performances by Quanda Johnson, PhD candidate from the Department of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, and from members of the First Wave Program.

Reception

A reception in the Virginia Harrison Parlor, Lathrop Hall, will immediately follow the performance.

About the curator

Chris Walker is a multi-hyphenate contemporary dance and performance artist, a UW-Madison professor of dance, the founding artistic director of the First Wave program in the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, and the current director of the Division of the Arts. His research is rooted in “resistance aesthetics” and draws upon the danced rituals, mas traditions, and embodied performance history of the African diaspora. Walker is also the co-artistic director for the #BARS Workshop at The Public Theatre in NYC, a lab series for artists to investigate the intersection between contemporary verse and theater, created by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs. He is a senior choreographer with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, and program director for the New Waves Dance & Performance Institute in Trinidad & Tobago. Walker has served as movement director for two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s Mlima’s Tale, which ran at the Public’s Martinson Hall and he was the choreographer for The Secret Life of Bees, The Musical produced by Atlantic Theatre in NYC. Walker has collaborated with Laura Anderson Barbata to develop Jus Luv/Rolling Calf, a Jamaican ‘mas,’ for her “Intervention: Indigo” project, a performance that was presented in the 2015 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Brooklyn, NY. Walker’s concert dance work has been presented in Europe, Asia and throughout the Americas. He has received numerous international and national grants and honors for his creative research. In 2020 he was named one of the School of Education’s Impact 2030 Faculty Fellows. Funds from the fellowship have been used to co-produce “Eat Little & Live Long” with Makeda Thomas Brooklyn, NY, and to produce his recent work “Rent-a-Tile” which premiered in Canada. He is currently finishing a film project titled “We Are Rough Drafts” that documents the creation of his work “Rough Drafts,” which includes interviews with his collaborators and members of the audience who experienced the work at the 60th Anniversary of the National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica. This month, Walker will give the keynote address at the 16th Annual Reading Festival presented by the Louise Bennett-Coverley Heritage Council. He was also selected by the Jamaica Dance Umbrella organizing committee to be honored in March at the annual Philip Sherlock International Arts Festival for his contribution to dance and representation of Jamaican dance at home and in the diaspora.

Acknowledgements

Moonshine is produced by the UW-Madison Dance Department and made possible with support from the Division of the Arts, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement, Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, the Black Cultural Center, the School of Music, the Wisconsin Union Theater, Madison Ballet, Barrio Dance, and Cafe Coda. This event was made possible with funding from the Anonymous Fund.