ADF and DANCECleveland To Premiere Work By Gregory Vuyani Maqoma and Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Building upon their partnership over the past few years and with a desire to work together to support artists and their creativity during this extraordinary moment in time, The American Dance Festival (ADF) and DANCECleveland have commissioned a new dance film by South African choreographer Gregory Vuyani Maqoma and poet, arts activist, and educator Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The new work, Untold Secrets of the Heart Chamber, will premiere online on February 25th at 7:00pm EST. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artists moderated by Gina Belafonte and Jefferson Tshabalala. The work will be available for additional viewings for 30 days following the premiere. This is a FREE event although there is a suggested donation of $10.

Untold Secrets of the Heart Chamber is a trans-Atlantic, pandemic-backdropped missive between almost strangers. Gregory Maqoma and Marc Bamuthi Joseph met in the fall of 2020 to begin discussing the matter of Black life as filtered through 25 years of South African democracy and one particularly hot summer on the American racial timeline. The result is a piece that connects these world-scaled events to the intimacy of the artists' respective homes and sanctuary spaces. Untold Secrets of the Heart Chamber is an 18-minute long dance film/live performance shot on two
continents in the time of COVID-19. Edited by David Szlasa, and performed by Maqoma and Joseph, the work ponders democracy, what grandmothers leave behind, and the safety extended from Black fathers to their sons.

Maqoma stated, "The idea to work with Marc Bamuthi Joseph has been in my mind for a while and I was just waiting for an opportunity. I don't think there could have been a better time than the one we are experiencing with COVID-19 and its ripple effect across the globe. The irony is that this devastation has brought many of us together but also separated the bad apples from the good ones and forced many to look deep inside their skin to validate their existence and accelerate personal

introspection. Working with Marc is an experience that is interwoven in words and movement, the architecture of body and sound that is embedded in our histories. To see this manifest and develop in different spaces, within the confinements, is both a privilege and a joy."

Joseph said, "I've been fascinated by Gregory Maqoma's work for over a decade and was elated to learn that he too felt an aesthetic kinship and collaborative curiosity. This work plays to our respective strengths while at the same time exposing the inherent vulnerabilities of making work in the time of the pandemic. We both bring a sense of heartbreak to our political analysis and an ethic of viscerality to our approach of the ethereal. I'm already learning so much about myself and about what's possible as we explore this new work and hope audiences might also accept the invitation to learn something new about what's generatively possible within the landscape of great loss..."

The link to Untold Secrets of the Heart Chamber will be live at https://bit.ly/2LGhHqd on Thursday, February 25th at 7:00pm EST and will be available for viewing for 30 days after the premiere.

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