HOLLY NEAR, FERRON & DANCE BRIGADE

The highlight of Dance Brigade’s 50th Anniversary Celebration Season will be the creation, performance, and touring of A Woman’s Song for Peace – a new dance theater work featuring original, live music by iconic musician and activist Holly Near, seminal queer feminist singer-songwriter Ferron, and groundbreaking Afro-Caribbean jazz artist Christelle Durandy, intertwined with Dance Brigade’s fierce, nuanced choreography and signature melding of styles with Hip Hop, Modern, Salsa, and Taiko – utilizing these storytelling components to convey a larger narrative about social justice and liberation. 

A Woman’s Song for Peace is Dance Brigade’s contribution to the current political and social dialogue around peace, war, and foreign policy in our society and in the world. We bear witness to wars in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and a culture/rhetoric of war and violence in our own society and at our Southern border. As we move through an intense and divisive Presidential election cycle in which these issues are front and center, we argue about specific details of foreign policy – and it’s easy to forget that we all share a basic desire for peace. 

 A Woman’s Song for Peace aims to reorient our audiences towards this priority, helping us remember our shared humanity. We believe that this collaboration can unify and activate people, and we offer our artistic response – a creative cry for peace – as a gift to our communities, an aid for individual and collective healing and transformation, and a vision for a way forward.

Biographies:

KRISSY KEEFER/DANCE BRIGADE Artistic Director Krissy Keefer explores the intersection between art and social issues with fierce inventiveness and a deft comic touch. Coming out of the legendary Wallflower Order (founded in 1975) Ms. Keefer has honed her craft over the last 40 years by creating her content-driven choreographies that are a high-energy blend of ballet, modern dance, jazz, song, text, sign language, and explosive Taiko drumming. Dance Brigade is sumptuous dancing; biting, intellectual, insightful wit; and provocative originality. This dynamic multi-racial troupe of women proves that socially relevant dance can be technically brilliant, as well as exuberant with down-home hilarious fun. This company dances at full throttle. The company has created over 10 full-length concerts of contemporary dance theater including Pandora’s Box, Ballet of the Banshees, Cinderella, Queen of Sheba, CaveWomen, Spell, The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie, The Great Liberation Upon Hearing, and Hemorrhage. For these productions, they received numerous grants and awards.

HOLLY NEAR is an American singer-songwriter, actress, teacher, and activist. After 50 years of bold work, Holly Near is still one of the most consistent and well-informed voices for change. Her work is loving, challenging, funny, thought-provoking, and remains rooted in the global community. As an outspoken singer and ambassador for peace, Holly brings a unique integration of world consciousness and self-evaluation, always growing and sharing experience humbly and boldly. A recipient of dozens of awards from organizations such as the ACLU and the National Organization of Women, Holly was one of Ms Magazine’s Women of the Year recipients and has been nominated for Grammys as well as the Legends of Women’s Music Award.

FERRON is a distinctive Canadian folk singer-songwriter and poet whose gritty style helped birth a 1990s underground movement. In addition to gaining fame as one of Canada's most respected songwriters, Ferron, who is openly lesbian, became one of the earliest and most influential lyrical songwriters of the women’s music circuit, and an important influence on later musicians such as Ani DiFranco, Mary Gauthier, and the Indigo Girls. From the mid-eighties on, Ferron's songwriting talents have been recognized and appreciated by music critics and broader audiences. In 1996 she received the OUTmusic Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Gay & Lesbian American Music Awards.

CHRISTELLE DURANDY fuses Afro-Caribbean, jazz and other polyrhythmic sounds in a provocative exploration of the African diaspora’s diffuse and powerful musical energy. Christelle currently fronts her Afro-Caribbean ensemble Sanktet as well as the Grammy-winning Pacific Mambo Orchestra. She contributes her talents as writer, arranger and performer to the all-female World-Latin music collective Cocomama. Her vocals have been featured on diverse projects with such luminaries as John Santos, Paula West, George Mesterhaze, Jon Faddis, Pedrito Martinez, Baptiste Trotignon, Toshi Reagon, Allison Miller, Luis Enrique, Paul Carlon Octet, LaFrae Sci, Camille Thurman, Edward Perez, Ran Blake, John Benitez, Max Pollak RumbaTap, Ricky Ford and Ze Big Band, La India, Camille A. Brown, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Meklit Hadero, Carlos “El Bola” Betancourt, and Millicent Jhonnie.