Opening Reception: The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People

taisha paggett and WXPT in collaboration with Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe

OPENING NIGHT PERFORMANCE:
Meadow, 8 pm

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a large-scale installation and performance platform that acts as a dance school. The School… responds to the limited positioning of Black and queer movers in the dance and art worlds amidst the evolving violence against Black bodies, gentrification, and the persistent erasure of communities of color throughout history.

Comprised of a variety of architectural interventions, choreographic portraits, videos, slide projections, and sculptural objects, the gallery space is set up as a dance studio and classroom with artworks as learning tools.

The School… was inspired by a Black high school believed to be founded by ancestors of paggett in East Texas in the early 1900s. Considering a reversed path of The Great Migration—when millions of African-Americans left the rural South for the West, North, and Midwest—this project began in Los Angeles, traveled to Austin, and is now present in Houston.

This multidisciplinary platform is built from the dance company WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), which uses dance moves, protest forms, weight exchange, concealment strategies, and the everyday movement vocabularies of survival and celebration that structure Black and queer life. All of these ideas inform this project’s central research question: What is a Black dance curriculum today?

taisha paggett is a dance artist, choreographer, and educator. Ashley Hunt is an image-maker, writer, and educator. Kim Zumpfe is an artist, educator, and sculptor. WXPT is an intentional community in the form of a dance company.