Admission to Open Call events is free with a ticket reservation. Reservations will be available to the general public on Thursday, July 18. For sold out performances, an in-person wait list will be available 15 minutes before the show begins. Reserve tickets HERE.
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An immersive dance performance honoring lineages of Black disabled imagination.
In How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up, Kayla Hamilton explores lineages of Black disabled imagination and alternative world-building through an immersive, community-specific, multidisciplinary dance performance.
The performance moves through three historical spaces—the cotton field, the Black church, and the freakshow/circus—where disability was hidden, deemed unproductive, reduced to spectacle, or asked to be prayed away. How to Bend Down/How to Pick it Up offers an archival exploration of these spaces and a reclaiming of agency, recentering the parts of the self that were discarded or suppressed in those settings while carrying forward the ancestral task of envisioning a future where every-body is free.
The production makes use of multiple audio descriptors and a performance structure that can reconfigure every night based on the performers’ changing needs.