Dispatches

Mawu Gora is a Brooklyn native currently residing in Philadelphia. As a Black, queer, Caribbean, and transdisciplinary artist, their artistic practice studies rhythm, ritual,  connection, and relatability. They are a graduate of Georgian Court University (BA) and Temple University (MFA). As a freelance artist, they have worked with Cardell Dance Theater, Big Dance Theater, and Jupiter Performance Studios. They are the founder and director of the project-based company, Ma’at Works Dance Collective, and an adjunct professor at Bryn Mawr College. They are currently collaborating with Kosoko Performance Studios on //shrouded\\.

What they’re working on: My transdisciplines serve as a healing art, both through resistance, hauntings, and cultural memory; ritual enhances imagination.  My curiosity is tethered to storytelling as a Black temporality into the interior. Black feminist scholarship bolsters these beliefs, as the Combahee River Collective reminds, "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom necessitates the destruction of all systems of oppression."Additionally, I'm interested in Fannie Lou Hamer's teachings that the land is our ally and our relationship with it is inherently liberatory. In this shape, art is a conduit, our bodies are constellations, and the dirt holds our stories, location is memory: the sand beaches, tar pits, and clay roads. Liberation points to ecologies of living mirrored in our relationship to the land. Ritual, lovemaking, stories, and the everyday become potent source material for these rebirths. My artmaking investigates the past through the eyes of those who have lived it. Ancestral stories are quintessential to understanding art as life.

www.mawuniverse.com/maatworks

Shoshana Isaacs is a queer interdisciplinary artist residing on Lenae/Lenape land (Philadelphia). They graduated from the University of the Arts in 2023 with a BFA in Dance and minor in Photography. At UArts, they had the opportunity to perform with Doug Varone, Joanna Kotze, Jesse Zaritt and Sara Shelton Mann, Sheer Spectacle, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd. Since graduating, they have performed for the Next Festival, Urban Movement Arts, and in their own works for the 2025 Cannonball Festival and The Gathering at &Space. 

Collaborating with Nella Biacs and Claire Natiez, they create movement using choreographic and improvisational practices that explore capacity, truthfulness, and looping. 

They also continue to work with photography as a freelance artist, mainly capturing dancers. In their downtime, they are a lab monitor at a community darkroom in Philadelphia called the Halide Project, where they work with analog photographic processes.

What they’re working on: Shosh will be collaborating with Claire Natiez during their time with The Whole Shebang. They will be using the space to workshop material created during a class series they will be teaching through Philly Dance Share. This series will explore multimedia elements and salon style creative improvisational exploration. As a part of the series, they plan to put together all the material made by class participants into a final project of sorts. This may be something physical: like a performance, or visual: like a zine and/ or video project, and may be presented either virtually or in person. They will use their time at the studio to work out the details and rehearse/play :)

shoshh.cargo.site

Vitche-Boul Ra is a Transhumanist Folk-Theurgist with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts (Sculpture concentration) from The University of the Arts [2018] with additional studies in Dance under Donna Faye Burchfield. Ra’s performance practice is anchored in Performativity as a means to investigate Black sovereignty and individual action. As a Philadelphia native, It has shown solo + collaborative works at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi gallery, Little Berlin gallery, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery. In New York, Ra has been curated into the Center for Performance Research’s 2018 Spring Movement Festival, the New Dance Alliance's 2019 Performance Mix Festival: 33, and both Movement Research as well as Black Aesthetics/J.A.W. at Judson Memorial Church in 2023. Continually It has collaboratively worked with Moor Mother [Goddess] showing at Pace Gallery (NY), CalArts REDCAT (LA), The Kitchen (NY), and the Chan Centre (BC). In 2021 It lectured at Yale School of Art and in 2023 Ra’s solo work was curated internationally at the Murray Art Museum Albury in Albury, NSW (Australia) in addition to being awarded a 2023 Pew Fellowship.

What they’re working on: I'll be working on new experiments for my work Gargorge. The work straddles a line of hyper-theatricality and spiritual practice, focusing on generating a kind of "bubble" or Gorge and figuring out the kind of maintenance that comes along with a self determined isolation. What is it to recognize and enforce distance, to activate the consequences of dejection? Move.

I will delve into movement and sonic forms from the Vogue/Ballroom tradition as well as reckon with Black pop culture material that has leaked into my oeuvre throughout my life to build a more solid vocabulary for the overall work and move it closer to being its own object.

www.VitcheBoulRa.com