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In June 2024, Indy Movement Arts will be hosting Neon Black, a Black dance festival celebrating local performing artists. It’s giving you contemporary dance, it’s giving you West African dance, it’s giving you Hip Hop, it’s giving you Latin styles, and we're working on getting some Majorette up in there too. We’re celebrating as many facets of Black dance as we can find! Summer is ours as we come to you live from The Madam Walker Legacy Center with this one-of-a-kind event. Neon Black will be joyful, powerful, excellent. Neon Black 2024 Featured Performing Artists: Allure Dance & Fitness Studio, Austin "Sirlimitless" Day, Create Freedom Arts Projects, Epiphany Dance Collective, iibada Dance Company, InDanza Dance Company, Kenyettá Dance Company (KDC), Relevations Dance Company, Ronald King, and Seda Negra/Black Silk Dance Company (SNBSDC)
But we wouldn’t be Indy Movement Arts if we didn’t include a way for YOU to get in the mix. International dance-maker, Michelle Gibson will be teaching her The New Orleans Original Buckshop accompanied by a live brass band!! Everyone is welcome to attend this all-levels workshop (did I mention the workshop is accompanied by a live brass band?). Drawing on her upbringing in New Orleans, Gibson “…engages participants in the culture and Diasporic traditions of Black New Orleans as pertains to the rooted history of the city, through dance, language, art and music…Using her Second Line Aesthetic in dance workshops…she acquaints participants with Second Line as a rooted spiritual impulse for movement.”
“‘Play with it’ means play with your own inner rhythm,” Ms. Gibson explained in an interview with the New York Time in July of 2022. “That’s your real you. Everybody second line different, honey, because everybody got their own different testimonies.”
Michelle N. Gibson is a Mother, Choreographer, Cultural Ambassador, Curator, Professor, Performing Artist, and Spiritualist. She received her BFA in Dance from Tulane University and her MFA from Hollins University in collaboration with the American Dance Festival at Duke University. Currently, Gibson is as a Professor of Practice in Dance at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and recently completed her 14th year on faculty with the American Dance Festival’s Pre-Professional Intensive at Duke University.
Michelle N. Gibson is a consummate storyteller, employing body and mind to build a bridge between the culture and academia, but most importantly, humanity. On stage and in the classroom, Gibson intricately intertwines Black African American dance traditions, choreography, and associated scholarship linking the vibrant heritage of New Orleans through the Caribbean to the vast expanses of Africa, evoking the social, political, economic, and spiritual understandings central to building bonds within and across cultures. This journey, steeped in both tradition and innovation, encapsulates Gibson’s unwavering commitment to heal the world through the culture.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Madam Walker Legacy Center, 617 Indiana Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46202-3173, United States,Indianapolis, Indiana
