ADF Commissioned World Premiere
Program: How To Be a Visitor
Running time: 65 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $27
All tickets are purchased through Duke University’s Box Office.
Company Website: www.culturemill.org
How To Be a Visitor is a new work by Culture Mill, conceived by dancer/choreographer Tommy Noonan in collaboration with artists across the world: Jassem Hindi (Palestine/France), Frank Mugisha (Rwanda/Uganda), Edgar Kanyike (Uganda), Sebulime Elisha Davis (Uganda), Cortland Gilliam (USA), and Caitlyn Swett (USA). This innovative performance connects artists and audiences across multiple countries through simultaneous, live-streamed solo performances in dance, sound, and poetry. Each participating location will host a live audience, with a screen displaying a real-time video feed from the other sites. These feeds will be mixed and manipulated live by Culture Mill’s media designer on-site in Durham, North Carolina, creating a dynamic, shared visual experience across all locations. The result is an immersive, trans-cultural encounter where audiences witness the clarity and complexity of shared experience across distance — navigating what it means to be a visitor in bodies, languages, and contexts not entirely their own.
About the Artists
Tommy Noonan is a director, choreographer, writer, performer, and organizer based in Saxapahaw, NC. His trans-disciplinary performances have been presented throughout the US and Europe, drawing from contemporary dance, theater, sound installation, and community facilitation to explore embodied encounters in specific places. Jassem el Hindi is a French-Palestinian-Lebanese artist and performer based in Norway. His work examines themes of haunting and hospitality, often beginning with death poems and broken iconographies cast in nervousness and necessity. Frank Mugisha is a dance artist working in East Africa and internationally. Trained in contemporary dance, breakdance, and African traditional dances, his work blends ancient, holistic, eco-centric practices with contemporary movement vocabularies.
Saturday, June 21 at 1:00 pm *Post-Performance Discussion
Sunday, June 22 at 1:00 pm
Photo Credit: Michael Rhebergen, Anna Maynard, & Marie Ursin