Keigwin + Company Is On a Mission to Dance in Africa
is experiencing the best kind of culture shock right now. As he wrote on his blog yesterday about arriving in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire:
Can you remember that instant when you landed on another continent and suddenly everything was foreign? My first impression? Holy Shit it is Hot (the kind of heat that fogs up your retina)! The sights, the sounds, the light, the scent (think diesel cars and BO) and the lifestyle all seem to be of another world. But it also doesn’t take long to realize that lifestyle really doesn’t matter very much, that we are all a part of the human community regardless if you have a roof over your head or shoes on your feet, we all have the same needs—to love and to dance.
And dance we do. We are on a mission to dance—to dance hard, to teach, to learn, to share, to exchange our worlds and we have endless hash-tags to prove it—#dancediplomacy, #culturalexchange, #DMUSA, #KCoDMUSA.
Keigwin + Company is doing a four-week long residency in Africa this month, performing, teaching, leading workshops and dancing together with fellow artists from another continent. It’s a cross-cultural exchange set up by DanceMotion USASM, a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department, produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
One of three contemporary companies chosen for the sixth year of the initiative, K + C started in Cote d’Ivoire, is currently in Ethiopia, and will soon make its way to Tunisia. They shared some of the amazing footage taken on their first stop with Dance Magazine. Take a peek, and follow the company’s upcoming adventures on Storify.
