Wake Up!
2015
Wake Up! is a site-based, dance theater production inspired by Spike Lee’s 1988 film, School Daze. With the setting moved from a fictitious historically black college campus to the University of Maryland, a historically white college, I and co-director, Vaughn Midder, set out to explore issues of race and gender as it concerns contemporary African-American college students. Wake Up! re-imagines the musical theater aspects of School Daze to build a dialogic platform in which the audience becomes active players and movers in the dance that surrounds them. This three-dimensionality invites the audience “behind closed doors” and into conversations that they may not be privy to or might be uncomfortable having.
"Built around her strengths as a choreographer." - Danielle Ohl, The Diamondback
“A masterpiece.” – Alvin Mayes, Undergraduate Director, University of Maryland
Wake Up! is an immersive and site-expansive, dance theater production inspired by Spike Lee’s 1988 film, School Daze. With the setting moved from a fictitious historically black college campus to a historically white college, I and co-director, Vaughn Midder, set out to explore issues of race and gender as it concerns contemporary African-American college students. Wake Up! re-imagines the musical theater aspects of School Daze to build a dialogic platform in which the audience becomes active players and movers in the dance that surrounds them. This three-dimensionality invites the audience “behind closed doors” and into conversations that they may not be privy to or might be uncomfortable having.