FROM STAFF REPORTS

HARPERSVILLE – Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis, directors and choreographers of Wideman Davis Dance in Columbia, S.C., collaborated with visual/performance artist Michaela Pilar Brown, curator and scholar of performance theory Myron M. Beasley, and dramaturg Gina Kohler to curate a new performance experience entitled Migratuse Ataraxia.

(Migratuse is defined as: Migrated, departed, to have gone away, having been changed, and the habitual patterns of moving from one place to another. Ataraxia is definded as: Calmness or a peace of mind, emotional tranquility.)

Through dialogue, creative collaboration and archival research, the collective of artists, performers and scholars seek to confront the physical violences and psychic weight, or what the group terms the “latent melancholia,” wrought by the legacies of antebellum life and symbols of racial violence in the present.

In naming these histories and illuminating their afterlives, the multi-media performance installation activates and engages black notions of history, movement and community to decenter and delegitimize the legacies of white-supremacy within the physical spaces and communal networks of the contemporary U.S. South.

Migratuse Ataraxia shifts the rules of representation in antebellum domestic spaces to memorialize the lives of enslaved individuals through movement, technology, visual installations, a curated meal and community dialogue.

Performers will lead audience members through a series of vignettes—each staged in a separate room—that de-territorializes each room and challenges notions of freedom and movement through racialized spaces.

Performances are Jan. 20-21, and 23-25 at 7 p.m., and Jan. 26 at 5 p.m. at the Klein-Wallace House in Harpersville.

Space is limited for each performance.

Tickets are $50 for adults and $35 for students (price includes the meal).

For more information about how to request tickets, email rosemary@alabamadancecouncil.org or call (205) 602-3599.

All tickets must be purchased in advance. No tickets are available at the door.

The presentation of Migratuse Ataraxia is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional funding support includes South Arts, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Daniel Foundation of Alabama.