Choreographers and dancers Crystal Michelle Perkins and Susan Van Pelt Petry join for an evening of original dance theater, Land, Sugar, Bone & Other Illustrations. With one duet and two solos, the artists explore stories of women, racial complexities, and histories re-imagined.

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"Land, Sugar, Bone" is a dance theatre duet composed collaboratively by Crystal Michelle Perkins and Susan Van Pelt Petry. The project explores how skin color carries code, history, and hierarchies, both as viewed by the self and by the other. Crystal Michelle Fuller, a woman of African American descent raised in the American South, and Susan Van Pelt Petry, a woman of Northern Europe and Scandinavian descent raised internationally, weave this 30-minute work with explicit references to colonialism, the triangular slave trade, black hair, whiteness, and privilege. The dancing, touching skin to skin, verbalizing inner racism, and naming their histories, is both transgressive and generative. 

 

Each artist presents solos: Perkins' "In Lieu of Flowers" re-imagines red riding hood folklore through black cultural memory, the green book travel manuals, and ancestral ritual; Petry's "Unfinished" is an auto-ethnographic essay revealing implicit whiteness and up-ending assumptions about femininity and age.  

 

Through dance, Land, Sugar, Bone & Other Illustrations is meant to question images of power, interrupt bias, and mobilize conversations about difference and truths about the effects of racial hierarchies.

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See our blog for more details about the process!