Produced by The Tank, slowDANCE, Emerging Artist Theater, Greenspace, ESTIA Day Fest, Northampton School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, and Star Mountain Amphitheater
Collaborators: Uila Marx, Alex Francois, Alexis Vinzons, Morgen Littlejohn
Sound Design by Lucia Gagliardone, Elliot Reza Emadian, Brennan Pope (Vision of a Kiss)
while I was homegrowing is a joy-saturated movement quartet that plays with memory, grief, community care, and a big clothesline! This dance-theater work excavates memory; Lucia has conversations with her father about his mother, who she never met, and seeks to unpack how her memory has become entangled in fabric and bones. Enthralled with the process of recreating her grandmother in memories that she does not tangibly possess, the memory work unravels into a deep pool of ancestors, both living and past, that the dancers dwell in. The dancers say, “I ache to know these ancestors inside me, and honor them”. while I was homegrowing is not narrative in a traditional sense; the overlay of movement, history, and textile unfolds into a living dance piece that leans on rigorous improv scores and choreographic vocabulary with text, play, sound, clothing, bodies in space, and joy. Dancers weave in and out of real and imagined narratives, adopting lineages and caring for each other.
Lucia Gagliardone 