This Friday and Saturday, two members of the dance department will present an evening of solo and duet performances, entitled “Connection.” Rachel Boggia, a Visiting Assistant Professor from New York, and Iddi Saaka, an Artist-in-Residence from Ghana, will perform dance works that, according to the Center for the Arts website, address “femininity, class, national origin and belonging.”
“All of the pieces, though developed separately, happen to share a common thread of concern with isolation and reaching out across boundaries, whether they be cultural or personal,” Saaka wrote in an e-mail to the Argus.
A third performer, Liam Clancy of the University of California San Diego’s department of Theatre and Dance, will join Boggia and Saaka. Saaka and Clancy have known each other since 2002 when both attended the UCLA graduate program in dance. Their first collaboration was during that time, and they have continued to work together since.
In many ways, this weekend’s recital is the fruition of years of preparation and exploration. “Looking for Evidence,” Saaka and Clancy’s duet which focuses on human commonalities despite issues of race, has been developing since 2006 when Saaka visited Clancy in San Diego for two intense months of work. In 2007, Clancy in turn visited Saaka in his home country of Ghana to try to experience firsthand the feeling of being a foreigner—something that is a part of Saaka’s reality in the United States. Finally, in the spring and fall of 2009, Liam made two trips to Wesleyan to solidify the duet.
For Boggia, the journey to the concert also began years ago. In the summer of 2008, Boggia commissioned a number of solos from two of her friends from her time as a graduate student at Ohio State University: Venezuelan dance and media artist Marlon Barrios Solano and choreographer Vanessa Justice. During this time, Boggia also choreographed a duet to be performed in her solo faculty concert last October, which was put on hold when she ruptured her ACL and tore her meniscus on the opening night of the concert.
“The silver lining is that she has had more time to develop the works and is more grateful than ever to be dancing,” Saaka wrote.
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