The CUNY Dance Initiative (CDI), an expansive program providing New York City choreographers and dance companies with creative residencies on CUNY college campuses, announces the world premiere of These are the bodies that have not borne., a site-specific performance by MBDance at the upcoming Snug Harbor Dance Festival. Performances are Saturday, August 23 and Sunday, August 24 at 6pm at Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island. Admission is pay-what-you-wish, with a suggested donation between $10-30. Get tickets here.

These are the bodies that have not borne. combines land art, choreography, original music, soil ecologies, and ritual. It is a reckoning and a healing offering that is a collective and individual somatic processing of unrequited desires and inherent worth in our bodies and livelihoods. Performers will submerge themselves in portals dug into the ground, literally dancing out of the Earth, provoking images and questions of burial, re-birth and of Earth as first parent. These are the bodies that have not borne. is choreographed and directed by Maria Bauman, assisted by Audrey Hailes. Mankwe Ndosi contributes original music, and it will be performed by a cast of seven: Graciella Ye’Tsunami, Rochelle Jamila, AJ Wilmore, Angel Edwards, Myssi Robinson, Audrey Hailes and Maria Bauman.

As a companion, MBDance also offers a self-published ‘zine,’ These are the bodies that have not borne. a whisper. a seed. an archive. – centering Black, queer, and trans experiences surrounding reproductive health and family building. Pre-orders are available here.

These are the bodies that have not borne. has been developed with the support of a PASS and Dance Festival residency at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden/Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, in partnership with the CUNY Dance Initiative.

MBDance

Maria Bauman founded MBDance in 2009. MBDance creates honest and bold art from a sense of physical and emotional power, centering the non-linear and linear stories and bodies of queer people of color, using dance as the wheel whose spokes are other genres including visual art, text, and song.

After dancing with Urban Bush Women, as well as serving as Director of Education Community Engagement and Associate Artistic Director, Bauman began creating dance works as a freelance choreographer. She formed her company to further amplify her unique creative point of view and to support dancers in honing the particular blend of physical risk and athleticism, Capoeira-esque floorwork and spatiality, emphasis on race and equity, and willingness to investigate intimacy that Bauman’s work excels within.

MBDance recently premiered (re)Source for four sold-out nights via co-commission between The Chocolate Factory and BAAD!. Among other honors, MBDance is a current BRIClab and Redtail Arts awarded resident company and Bauman is one of only a handful of choreographers across the nation who are honored as Urban Bush Women National Choreographic Center Fellows. MBDance has also earned 2017-19 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence, CUNY Dance Initiative Residencies in both 2014 and 2015, Harlem Stage Funds for New Work via The Jerome Foundation in both 2013-14 and 2009-10, a 2010-11 Dance Theater Workshop (now NYLA) Studio Series and Art Mill creative residencies in 2012 and in 2010.

MBDance has performed across the world, from NYC SummerStage to Singapore to the My Body My Space Festival in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

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