RADicle 21/22

RADicle was postponed to the 2021/2022 season. We were sorry to have to postpone this residency, but are glad to have still able to support Helanius within this collaborative residency with RAD Fest.

The current RADicle recipient is Helanius J Wilkins. While in residence at The Croft in 2021 he will be working on The Conversation Series. At RAD Fest 2022 he will be a featured artists with an evening length showcase.

Helanius J Wilkins Bio

Helanius J. Wilkins, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, is an award winning choreographer, performance artist, and scholar. His creative research and projects are rooted in the interconnections of American contemporary performance, cultural history, and identities of Black men. In his intermedia collaborations he works with artists from a wide range of disciplines, including film, video, and design. He lived in Washington, D.C. for eighteen (18) years and founded EDGEWORKS Dance Theater, an all-male dance company of predominantly Black men that existed for thirteen (13) years (2001 - 2014). His honors include the 2008 Pola Nirenska Award for Contemporary Achievement in Dance, DC’s highest honor given by the Washington Performing Arts Society; the 2002 and 2006 Kennedy Center Local Dance Commissioning Project Award; and multiple Metro DC Dance Awards. In addition to performing the works of nationally recognized choreographers including Robert Moses, Joy Kellman, and Kevin Wynn, he performed with Maida Withers’ Dance Construction Company (DC), and as a guest with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (MD).  He has equally enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, creating, presenting, and receiving commissions for choreography throughout the United States and abroad. To date, he has choreographed and directed over 60 works, which includes two critically-acclaimed musical productions for Washington, DC’s Studio Theater – “Passing Strange” (2010) and “POP!” (2011). Foundations and organizations including New England Foundation for the Arts (National Dance Project), National Performance Network (NPN), the Boulder Office of Arts & Culture Public Arts Program, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts have supported his work. He is a member of the National Board of Directors of the American College Dance Association for the Northwest region, and was most recently appointed by Governor Jared Polis to the Colorado Council on Creative Industries. He is also currently Associate Chair and an Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Theatre & Dance at University of Colorado Boulder.

“The Conversation Series” Description

The Conversation Series is an original, intermedia project where two male co-conspirators, one queer Black body, one heteronormative White body commit to unrestricted sociality centering on a collective laboring toward personal, political, and environmental (un)doing and (re)constructing.

Unfolding as a series of episodes, The Conversation Series will be an exhaustive collision course of in-between states that Wilkins is developing and performing collaboratively with Avery Ryder Turner. Unaccepting straightforward solutions, they seek exposure to dissonances and human complexity to find home where the paths to a less blemished future can begin. They have already gathered and interacted at informal sites, wheat fields, spillway infrastructures, and baseball dugouts on indigenous territories of Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute Nations. These spaces and the ones yet to be determined are chosen to access and generate intellectual, somatic, emotional, and intuitive knowledge, consequently decentralizing institutional knowledge. This evening-length work will meld together live performance, dance, music, design, film, and technology.

Wilkins embraces his Southern heritage as rich resources for defining an “American” identity shaped by hybridity, resilience, and co-existence. He rejects notions of hierarchy by preferencing the value of bodies coexisting –sharing weight, responsibility, and performance become the means for moments of recognition and transformation. The Conversation Series, matched with the collective commitment of Wilkins and Turner to each other, embodies the response that Wilkins believes is necessary for manifesting a more socially just America.

The Conversation Series is a byproduct of Multiscapes, a work performed by Wilkins and Turner that premiered in March 2020, and emerges out of a creative process that spanned nearly two years.

Short Bios of some of his collaborators for “The Conversation Series”

The Conversation Series is the result of Wilkins joining forces with composer/musician Andy Hasenpflug, a western PA-based artist who is the Music Director for the American Dance Festival and a faculty member for Slippery Rock University’s Department of Dance; cinematographer Carlos Flores, a CO-based artist who is the founder of Watcheye Studios, a new film and art production company, and whose work often explores queer themes and cultural/linguistic diaspora and seeks social relevance and respect for humanity; technical director/lighting designer Iain Court, a CO based artist who is the Director of Dance Production at CU Boulder and has an extensive history of working in design that includes new media performance and installations; technology director/programmer/designer Peter Gyory, a CO-based ATLAS PhD student at CU Boulder whose areas of expertise include games, XR, and tangible interaction; and dancer/community-engagement co-facilitator Avery Ryder Turner, a CO-based performer, dance builder, and movement coach with an emphasis in improvisational arts. The Conversation Series is a unique project in that collaboration with artist-residents of various communities is an essential component to the creation of the work. During his RADIcle residency at The Croft, Helanius will be joined by Turner, and working with DeJaun Jordan, a Petoskey based videographer and content creator.