spotlight

A group of twelve people pose in front of a white wall. on the floor level, four group members either sit, lie, kneel or lunge on the ground. standing members lean on one another on either side of the crew, and people in the center sit or lay on a bench together.
Photo Credit: Cannonball

Cannonball Bets on Philadelphia’s Indie Artists

Caitlin Green

“Cannonball is no one person’s vision, but the collective fever dream of us all.”

The West Philadelphia High Dance Ensemble performs in front of an audience seated around the perimeter of the room. The dancers stand close to each other with their arms raised mid-clap overhead. Some dancers wear long evergreen or rose colored dresses, while others are dressed in black pants and a white button-down shirt. One dancer stands in front of the group wearing a preacher’s robe. The ensemble resembles a lively church congregation.
Photo: Courtesy of Black Dance Confab

Celebrating Philadelphia’s Black Dance Legacies

Caitlin Green

“Without [them] we wouldn’t have had a portal to come through.”

nora chipaumire, a Black African woman takes the stage in 100% POP with her collaborator, Shamar Watt, a Black Jamaican man in a black Adidas tracksuit and red-green-yellow, Zimbabwe-flag-colored Nike shoes. As he runs through the frame upstage, backgrounded by a grungy, urban wall, chipaumire captures the camera’s focus as she jumps into the air, one knee tucked up to her chest, the other a foot off the ground. Wearing a ripped white shirt, black track pants, and all-white high tops, chipaumire gazes down at the ground while she leaps up, as if stomping her way back to Earth.
Photo: Ian Douglas

The West Did Not Make Me

ankita

An Interview with nora chipaumire

A woman with short cropped hair wearing a long white tunic balances on her left leg in front of a large stone pillar and a section of the American flag. She looks over her extended right arm, her wrist gently lifted.
Photo: Meg Goldman

The Truth Lives in The Body

Lauren Berlin

Reflections from Naomi Goldberg Haas on Movement, Belonging, and the Body as a Place to Return