Power Moves
Saturday, March 26 | 8PM

Oxana Chi and Layla Zami
I STEP ON AIR

A dance-music-word femmage-tribute to Afro-German poet and activist May Ayim, who was “Germany’s Audre Lorde”.

An entertaining and meditative performance, which creates an intimate and liberating universe. Accompanied by her partner Layla Zami, Oxana Chi takes you on a poetic-political journey back to the roots… or into Afropean futures?

Maria Bauman/MBDance
excerpt from dance ritual in progress, dying and dying and dying

Maria Bauman is creating dying and dying and dying by mining dream space and conceptual space to uncover a danced ritual. As both her grandfathers have recently transitioned, she is pondering their absence on this earth, the nature of interruption, what it means and what it takes to stop, how our rituals can be both spontaneously created and full of meaning at the same time, how to stay in touch with ancestors, and what role surrender has in all of this. Bauman is examining death with the premise that it is all around us. We practice dying at the end of yoga practices in Savansana, or Corpse Pose. Black people are dying at the hands of police in overwhelming numbers, making our mortality feel immediate. We have brushes with suicide. We are, in fact, dying all the time from the moment we are born. And this constant dying makes Bauman think of capitalism which feels like its opposite—constant producing. How can we interrupt capitalism, our internalized prioritizing of doing more and faster, with small deaths—moments of rest, of nothing, of stopping? This meditation is dying and dying and dying.