"Rejoice! is the brainchild of artistic director Oluyinka Akinjiola, a company she created in 2014 to bring, in her words, "Black vernacular, African traditions, African diasporic, West African traditions, to a contemporary landscape." GRIOT, the latest step in that process, will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, Sept. 12-21, in the Massee Performance Lab at Reed's Performing Arts Building."
"It was at this time that she discovered the work of dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. "When I was choosing what was the right path for me," Akinjiola says, "I was introduced to [Dunham's] work and started reading her biographies and realized I wanted to bring my background in immigrant, refugee and social justice nonprofits together. I wanted to combine social justice and dance, or 'artivism.'""
Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater stages GRIOT, a dance-theater journey tracing cultural roots from Senegal to Brazil and into the American South that honors the griot as keeper of oral tradition, lineage, and community spirit. In West Africa, griots serve as musicians, poets, mentors, educators, and storytellers who hold communal memory and sustain cultural values. Artistic director Oluyinka Akinjiola founded the company in 2014 to bring Black vernacular and West African diasporic traditions into contemporary performance and to fuse social justice work with dance as a form of 'artivism.' GRIOT runs Sept. 12–21 with evening and matinee performances at Reed College.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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