Dancing Your Age—Performance: Build-A-Floor Celebration Festival

A.P.E.@Hawley Presents:

Build-A-Floor Celebration Festival: Honoring floors for dancing and the lineage of Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, and Contact Improvisation

Thursday-Sunday, May 2-5

Project host: Andrea Olsen

The Workroom at 33 Hawley and Shepherd’s Barn at Historic Northampton

Northampton, MA USA

Dancing Your Age—Performance

12-2 PM

Shepherd Barn, Historic Northampton

66 Bridge Street, Northampton

Dancing Your Age is a group performance that features the lives of five dancers and the world-music of percussionist Tony Vacca inside the newly restored, historic Shepherd Barn (1805). Each dancer draws on their kinesthetic imagination and embodied memories to explore every year in their lives through movement, from their earliest days to the present, creating a performance that is at once individual but held within the rhythms of Tony Vacca's music.

Dancing your Age is a practice developed by dance artist Andrea Olsen that is taking place at different dance sites around the globe from 2023-25.

Welcome and introductory remarks by Historic Northampton co-directors Elizabeth Sharpe and Laurie Sanders. Following the performance by dancers Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, Maya LaLiberté, Cameron McKinney, and Andrea Olsen, a Q & A and conversation with the audience will take place.

Reserve your place; Sliding scale $10-$25

In partnership with A.P.E@33 Hawley. Funding benefits Historic Northampton and A.P.E@33 Hawley. The event is part of the Build-a-Floor Celebration weekend at 33 Hawley in Northampton, MA—honoring floors for safe dancing and movement artists past, present and future.

Andrea Olsen is a dancer, writer, educator, and long-time participant in creative endeavors in Northampton—including hosting the Build-A-Floor project and celebration. She teaches and performs internationally and is author of four books on embodiment: Bodystories, Body and Earth, The Place of Dance, and Moving Between Worlds.

Tony Vacca is a self-described “rhythm nomad.” Over the course of his career locally and globally, he has made a habit of pushing the already adventurous conventions of World Music into new territory, both as a soloist and as the leader of three group projects: World Music Ensemble, Fusion Nomads, and The Senegal-America Project. Twenty-one trips to West Africa and many cross-cultural collaborations have contributed to his unique approach and to his depth of knowledge regarding African and American musical traditions. He currently has eight recordings and a new book of words called “the Rescue of Luminous Being."

Tony has worked creatively with Olsen since l978, creating balafon music for dance classes at Thornes Market; they continue their journey four decades later through the Dancing Your Age project.