LaTasha Barnes' The Jazz Continuum
Due to the layout of NEC's Plimpton Shattuck Black Box, there will be no late seating for this performance.
LaTasha Barnes' The Jazz Continuum centers the prolific artistry of Jazz music and dance as a cornerstone of Black American culture and community. Featuring an intergenerational and multidisciplinary cast of Black dancers and musicians, this offering to the continuum celebrates the joy and sacred power of the Black experience to each artist and the ensemble.
Barnes reaches back nearly 100 years, making visible the connections between the past and today's Black dance expressions: House, Hip-Hop, and more. The New York Times said of the Bessie Award-winning Barnes: "Barnes is especially extraordinary for the way the past and the present can pass through her." Her facilitation of the casts' exploration of their relationships to Jazz and its progenies through mind-bending musicality spectacular athleticism, and boundless joy, shine through the work's expansive and riveting choreography.
The Jazz Continuum celebrates music and dances from across the diaspora, with works drawn from Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, Cuba, Angola, and Brazil. It conjures the spirits of Black dance elders, including Norma Miller Frankie Manning, Earl "Snakehips" Tucker, Marie Bryant, and Marjory Smarth, and many others. Be prepared to witness and celebrate the life and lives of the continuum...
Please be advised that a section of the production uses flashing "club" lights. This occurs about 30 minutes into the production.
“Continuum is expertly choreographed—the details of the movements and the architecture of the staging clearly drawn—but there is yet an easy-going feeling of improvisation that could slyly belie the work’s formidable structure and the performers’ intense work.”
Boston Globe
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Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theater Information
This performance is generously sponsored by
Susan & Michael Thonis, with additional support provided by the Amy Lam Fund for Creative Performance.
The presentation of The Jazz Continuum is made possible in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
This performance is made possible in part by support from Celebrity Series' LIVE PERFORMANCE! Arts for All Innovation Funds.
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