Dance Place is excited to host and present Gaze, a 5-day virtual festival highlighting local and national LGBTQIA+ artists and companies. Featuring performances from Creep Cuts and jumatatu m. poe and Donte Beachem and virtual workshops as part of Excessive Realness, a queer-normative dance intensive, this full week event will celebrate and honor queer identities and expression.

About Excessive Realness- June 16-20, 2021 (virtual)

Excessive Realness is a queer-normative dance intensive geared toward LGBTQIA+ people who consider themselves dancers or use dance as a tool for their own artistic and personal practice. This intensive provides a platform for participants to channel their own artistic practices, personal expression, and sociopolitical engagement through dance, performance, queerness, and the many other intersecting identities that people within these communities hold.

Let ‘im Move You: This is an Invitation 

Wednesday, June 16th at 5:00pm EST

Streaming on danceplace.org through Monday, June 28 following the presentation 

This Is an Invitation is the latest project in jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham’s Let ‘im Move You decade-spanning series of performance and installation projects.  Since 2009, jumatatu and Donte — with an extensive squad of collaborators —have centered their explorations of J-Sette movement and culture to explore recurring themes of intimacy, spectacle, belonging, organization, tenderness, and happiness.  These performance and installation projects source J-Sette’s legacy of formatting call-and-response choreographies, social hierarchies, sensual and spectacular movement choreographies, and ornate rhythmic structures in order to activate playful and complex images of Black femininity and queer affection.  Invitation juggles between two choreographed duets, both filmed at dawn in outdoor locations in Mississippi (Jackson and Hazlehurst) and Bahia (Salvador and Itaparica), respectively.  The two duets — jumatatu and Donte in Mississippi, and Sebastião Abreu and Uoston Alcântara in Bahia — are both performed and auto-documented by the respective pairs, each framing self and environment as a means to create the terms for being seen.  The project is choreographed by jumatatu and Donte, directed by jumatatu.

Click here for Day 2

Click here for Day 3

Click here for Day 4

Click here for day 5