Reflections Dance Festival: Artists of Color Share a Third Love Letter to Seattle at the RSJI Summit on Friday, March 24
release date: March 14, 2023
Filmed on the elegant stage of Pier 62 on Seattle’s waterfront, Reflections Dance Festival 2023 returns as another stunning love letter to the city of Seattle.
The third chapter of this unique dance festival will be screened as the closing program of the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice (RSJI) Summit during a special livestream program on Friday, March 24, from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Reflections is FREE and open to the public. Register for the RSJI Summit’s Community Day, including Reflections, at this EventBrite link.
“The waters of Seattle hold stories and histories that range from happy to painful,” said Jordan Remington, Reflections curator, and public programs manager at Friends of Waterfront Seattle. “As the waterfront changes and people start coming back after COVID, Reflections continues to lift up Seattle artists while building solidarity between our communities and healing rifts formed through colonization. The dances and artistic process of the festival shows unity while creating beautiful reflections of our communities.”
Reflections debuted in the first year of the pandemic in 2020 to an audience of 4,000. Reflections 2023 continues to feature contemporary dancers and cultural practitioners of color who care about culture and equity in the arts. Reflections is co-presented by The Seattle Public Library and Friends of Waterfront Seattle, with lead partners Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects.
Reflections 2023 will be the culminating cultural program for the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) Summit co-presented by the Race and Social Justice Initiative, Seattle Office for Civil Rights, and Seattle Center, in partnership with Converge Media, from March 23 to March 24, 2023. The RSJI Summit is a free event open to both in-person and virtual attendees. City of Seattle employees are invited to attend on Thursday, March 23, and community members can join a livestream program on Friday, March 24, from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Reflections 2023 features the following artists and cultural practitioners.
REFLECTIONS DANCE FESTIVAL ARTIST BIOS
- Akoiya Harris, “When Tomorrow Comes.” Seattle-based movement artist Akoiya Harris is a graduate of the Ailey School’s Certificate Program and has performed as a company artist with Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater. Akoiya describes her Reflections piece as an embodiment of “our futures as Black Queer people. We exist in an imaginative state capable of building a world that is safe for us. We can rest in the future, be celebrated, feel joy, while engulfed in the warmth of community. This piece wonders and reminds us, too, that the future is endless and exciting, yet still requires great effort to get to.”
- Elise Beers (Unangax), “Anax̂ The Sky Woman - Falling to New Heights.” Elise Beers Aachix̂ Qağaduug, is an enrolled member of the Aleut-Unangax Native American Tribe, and a Seattle-based choreographer, filmmaker, photographer and dancer with Earthworks Dance and ebprojects. She is studying for her MFA in filmmaking at the American Film Institute. Beers’ Reflections piece is inspired by the story of Anax̂, the Sky Woman, who fell to earth through an uprooted tree in the stars and created Turtle Island. “We are all here on Native land provided by our Anax̂,” said Beers. “In this dance we explore falling and rising in multiple perspectives. Reciprocity is key to survival. Sky Woman was saved from her fall, and so she still gives.” As with Sky Woman, the dance sweeps in gestural movements. “The floating images of the dance coalesce to capture the sense of falling from the sky. As an Indigenous artist, I aim to restore current Native art within our fine art dance landscapes. We are still here.”
- Naomi Bragin and Milvia Pacheco, “Umalalengua Okan”: Naomi Bragin is a dancer, artist, scholar and educator at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Washington Bothell. Milvia Pacheco is a dancer, painter, poet and executive director of Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle (MÁS). Since 2019, Bragin and Pacheco have collaborated on “Little Brown Language,” which involves researching submerged histories of resistance to colonial encounters in Venezuela and the Philippines, reinterpreted as dance-incantations. Together, these artists blend cultural syncretism and portal, and share and play with each other’s languages. Their Reflections piece is an extension of “Little Brown Language” performances and workshops at the intersection of healing, ritual and art. “In this dance, a cosmic foot stomps,” the artists said. “Watch these moments map meeting points, reconnecting lost paths of relation. Where to? Where language meets ports unknown. They harbor our dance.” The soundtrack for their Reflections piece is by Washington D.C. musicians who fuse techno/house.
- Moonyeka, “Sigh-rens: a wail, a cry, a threat”: Moonyeka (they/them) is a trans nonbinary Iloxano-Filipinx “shapeshifter, witch, teaching artist, curator, scholar and interdisciplinary artist with a specialty in dance and harnessing their erotic power for communal enchantment, transformation and liberation for their community.” A 2022 Velocity Dance Center creative artist, Moonyeka describes their Reflections piece as “biomythographic research manifesting as an interdisciplinary performance utilizing Aswang myth and legend.” Artists in the piece include Zara Martina (dancer), Juno (vocalist), Jessica Jones (trumpet), Kiki Robinson (vocalist) and Otto Barry (saxophone). “In the spirit of re-mything, this exploration honors siren spirits as oceanic death allies in alchemizing ‘sin’ and laying to rest those in the Queer Trans diaspora who have endured death cycles and are thriving in the face of impossibility,” said Moonyeka.
Reflections is made possible with support from The Seattle Public Library Foundation, Friends of Waterfront Seattle and Washington Community Alliance.
MORE INFORMATION
The City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice (RSJI) Summit is presented on March 23 and 24, 2023. Under the theme “Healing, Belonging and Unity,” the RSJI Summit will feature two days of anti-racist learning, celebration and restoration to explore how Seattle can recover from the pandemic while centering racial equity. Check out the RSJI Summit page on the City of Seattle website for updates.
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Friends of Waterfront Seattle is the nonprofit partner to the City of Seattle responsible for helping to fund, build, steward, and program the park — today and into the future. In deep collaboration with individuals, communities, and institutional partners, Friends of Waterfront Seattle’s mission is creating, caring for, and activating a renewed place on Seattle’s central shoreline to connect — to the water, to the mountains, to our city, and to one another. In addition to raising $110M by 2024 to fund park construction, Friends of Waterfront Seattle will provide funding and manage the programming and operations of the future Waterfront Park through a joint-delivery partnership with Seattle Parks & Recreation. Visit waterfrontparkseattle.org for details.