About HOME
HOME is an international cross-collaborative dance project with choreographers from six countries: Maria Naidu (Sweden), Ashley Lobo (India), Souleymane Badolo (Burkina Faso), Sandra Paola López Ramírez (Colombia), Bassam Abou Diab (Lebanon), and Dance Entropy’s Artistic Director Valerie Green (US). These esteemed choreographers were commissioned by Green to create a work for her company examining the meaning of home from their unique perspectives, drawing upon the significance of this concept in their home countries. Directed by Green, the dynamic full-evening work, which weaves together the different dances, explores identity, culture, environment, ritual, history, and community.
About Valerie
Valerie Green’s Home is a reflection of the company dancers’ ideas of what home means to them, paired with research of what Americans across the country feel about home. The movements are juxtaposed with Balkan music, home for Green given her Serbian roots/identity.
On The United States
About Ashley
Ashley Lobo’s idea of home is the dichotomy of confusion and clarity that is India. Everything is chaotic but within that there seems to be a naturally evolving order, the natural progression from confusion to clarity.
On India
About Paola
Paola Lopez Ramirez’s Home is simple and complicated. Home. Hogar, land, territorio, ancestry. Home is all that is mundane and the most inexplicable magic. Home is that which bred you, all you love and all you hate. Magnificent complexity.
On Colombia
About Souleymane
Souleymane Badolo says of home, “I am like a snail, I carry my house with me wherever I am, wherever I go. I still have my culture, tradition, and my language that I speak, and also my land and my ancestors living in me. My house is my movement, my dance.”
On Burkina Faso
About Maria
For Maria Naidu, Home is energy. Energy is movement. Movement is dance. Dance is home. She quotes Verlyn Klinkenborg as saying, “The most basic meaning of home is a place that can’t be seen with a stranger’s eye for more than a moment. Home is home, and everything else is not. It is so familiar that you don’t even notice it. It’s everywhere else that takes noticing. Home is more than just a place. It’s also an idea, a way of organizing space in our minds.”
On Sweden
About Bassam
Bassam Abou Diab’s home is linked to accepting religious, ethnic and cultural differences to generate a feeling of safety and belonging. Home is acceptance, safety, security, and privacy. “It is the space in which I feel I can be free, natural and present; the place in which I entrust my secrets and my details. It is the place that gives me the feeling of being an integral part of the place that I feel comfortable despite my racial, gender and social differences.”