LEWISTON — Just weeks after Marc Bamuthi Joseph presented his performance piece “red, black & GREEN: a blues,” a theater production workshop at Bates College will debut an original adaptation of Joseph’s ballet libretto “Home in 7.”

Retitled “Home, Among Other Transitional Places,” the piece features dance, drama, poetry and video.

“Home, Among Other Transitional Places” is a dramatic presentation of Joseph’s six-part autobiographical poem about his relationship with the city of Atlanta. A New York native who attended Morehouse College, Joseph was inspired by the city’s history, particularly stories of the Atlanta child murders in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

“History is made faceless as the next generation loses a connection,” Joseph told Creative Loafing Atlanta, an alternative weekly newspaper. “I’m interested in facilitating that conversation between the solid forms of today and the city’s ghosts.”

“Home, Among Other Transitional Places” is the first original mainstage theater-dance collaboration from the department of theater and dance, formed this academic year after the creation of a dance major at the college in 2011. It is directed by Katalin Vecsey, senior lecturer in theater, with choreography and video design by Rachel Boggia, visiting assistant professor of dance. 

The seven performers in the piece include six students in the annual theater production workshop held during Bates’ Short Term, a five-week spring semester.

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Joseph, a poet, performer, educator and director of performing arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, wrote “Home in 7” for performances by the Atlanta Ballet in 2011. As this academic year’s artist-in-residence at Bates, he worked with the theater workshop faculty and students during the first week of the Short Term course.

Joseph is one of America’s vital voices in performance, arts education and artistic curation. This year, he was an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Artist Award, and last year received the Alpert Award in the Arts for Theater. In 2007, he was featured on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine after being named one of America’s Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences.

Joseph will make a taped appearance in the digital images projected around the actors and dancers.

“Home, Among Other Transitional Places” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, May 17-19; and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 20, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Performances are open to the public at no charge. They are under 45 minutes and will be followed by a question-and-answer session. For more information, call 786-6161.


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