This excerpt is from a work in progress performance at University of Iowa in October 2014. We created this work in a one-week residency with undergraduate and graduate students and collaborators from Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project.

“Hands Up DIS/UNITY - make this not us against them" was an immersive installation and performance in dialog with the anti-racist movement #BlackLivesMatter. This piece involved the Iowa City and University of Iowa community through performance workshops, classes, and word-of-mouth. The workshops interrogated infrastructures that criminalize and pathologize black bodies. Painters, dancers, printmakers, performance artists, and activists joined the project. An eight-member interdisciplinary team developed through this work. Through dance, video, and live music, the performance the project encouraged audiences to consider the efficacy of resilience, protest, and radical tenderness as strategies against institutional racism.

From this piece, the Propelled Animals were born.

Dancers featured in this video include Duane Lee Holland Jr., Maurice Watson, Barber, Katie Skinner, Destiny Washington, and Hannah Gross.

Directed by: Esther Baker-Tarpaga
Music: Barber, Zebra Katz, Shinamo Moki, Tous les matins du Monde, Angie Stone
Video: Naoki Izumo
Photographer: Derek Blackman
Costume: Juliana Waechter
Set Design: Heidi Wiren Bartlett
Lighting: Laurel Shoemaker
Performers & Collaborators: LaMar Barber, Heidi Wiren Bartlett, David Dunlap, Courtney Flemming, Hannah Gross, Duane Lee Holland, Naoki Izumo, Anna Krupp, Paula Lamamie de Clairac, Brooke Robinson, Amy Simonson, Kuldeep Singh, Kathryn Skinner, Corrine Teed, Destiny Washington, Maurice Watson

Dance Gala 2014
University of Iowa
Dance Department
Iowa City, IA | October 2014