Dance Place
3225 8th Street, NE
Washington, DC 20017
Tickets: $8-$22
By telephone: (202) 269-1600
Online: www.danceplace.org
THE LOVING PROJECT: E-RACE is an interactive dance theater performance that will enliven imagination, challenge assumptions, and invite audience input.
Created and performed by Laura Schandelmeier & Stephen Clapp in collaboration with Peter DiMuro, Ilana Faye Silverstein, Ken Yamaguchi-Clark and Dance Place repertory performers Michelle Anthony, Christine Curella, Heather Doyle, Jill Newman, Stacy Paull, Maria Trapodi and Pamela Williams. The Loving Project: E-Race is an interactive dance theater performance that explores interracial marriages and nontraditional partnerships through historical and present-day perspectives.
Through performance, audience interaction, and community partnership, The Loving Project: E-Race reflects upon social issues including racism, sexism and gender bias and uncovers aspects of partnership that make union across cultural boundaries viable. The work weaves together a tapestry of stories that include: the case of Loving vs. Virginia, which in 1967 overturned the law against interracial marriage in Virginia; the marriage between Russian Inventor Léon Theremin and dancer with the American Negro Ballet, Lavinia Williams; and the controversial Defense of Marriage Act which was signed into federal law in 1996 and hinders rights to same sex partners nationally. Schandelmeier & Clapp's fifth evening length work, The Loving Project: E-Racecelebrates distinctive partnerships and the rare gifts they bring to the world.
As citizens of the United States sharing an interracial partnership with the benefit of legal marriage, Schandelmeier & Clapp often find themselves at the center of a contemporary dialogue about race, gender privilege, class ethnography, social dogma and political discourse. As a duet performance ensemble, they find respite from the challenges and tensions of this dialogue through the development of creative works that reflect their responses to these issues and invite a deeper exchange of ideas towards community transformation and cultural understanding. In today’s climate of global financial uncertainty, environmental crises, protracted warfare -- and hope for systemic positive social change, Schandelmeier & Clapp see creative collaboration as a critical source of understanding across (perceived and actual) cultural, ethnic, economic and civic boundaries. It is this collaborative process that has brought the duo through the development of five evening-length performance works over the past six years. Through in-depth research, creative exploration, ensemble development, community participation, movement discovery, and peer feedback, Schandelmeier & Clapp are building upon their creative and life partnership and experiences in a context of contemporary society and culturally accepted (and unaccepted) behaviors.
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