VCUarts dance professor, MK Abadoo, receives grant for new work

MK Abadoo, and assistant professor of Dance at VCUarts, has been awarded a 2022 National Dance Production Project grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts for their work “Hoptown.” The National Dance Project is one of the country’s major sources of funding and field building for dance, supporting the creation and touring/sharing of new works. The $56,500 grant will be used for artist fees, residency costs and community engagement. 

Hoptown immerses audiences in sistering methodologies of Black girls and women, thriving together over generations. It is inspired by the near parallel lives of two women from MK’s ancestral hometown, Hopkinsville “Hoptown” Kentucky: her mother, Regina Bowden, and Black feminist writer, bell hooks.

With audiences in the center of the performance space, the work unfolds within the experience of a total solar eclipse. In 2017, Hopkinsville was one of few global cities at the point of greatest eclipse. In Hoptown, audiences are enveloped in the luminescence of darkness. Here, witnesses are surrounded by the whispered power of vulnerable moments shared between four generations of Black women. Partnering with southern youth and elder-centered organizations, Hoptown creates a performance ritual guided by the potency of life-giving bonds formed in the dark spaces of one’s life, and the potential for blooming in any place or time.”

While the work establishes itself in Hopkinsville, it will be coming to Richmond in Fall 2023 in partnership with Dogtown Dance Theatre and the Community Media Center at the ICA. In Richmond, they will grow the oral history project that is being developed in tandem with the dance performance, that uplifts the Sistering stories of black women, girls and gender expansive folks

In addition to MK, VCU Dance faculty member Julinda Lewis, and VCU Dance alumni Christine Wyatt and Sehay Durant, are core performers of the project.
Additional information on the grant awardees and National Dance Project can be found here.

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