All photos in this Gallery were taken by Shakira (footage in the hallway and in the cafeteria). She documented our entire afternoon of 'guessturing', call and response and making short dances. We are enjoying our selves and having fun with the camera's multiple-frames-per second feature!
All photos by Shakira, except the string of shots taken by Malik of Ilunga and I.
Please follow this link to find the recent video documentation to a light / shadow workshop I facilitated this month with Teen Exchange.
As well as this link to the Teen Exchange Tumblr and here for more information about this youth-lead modern dance group.
Since mid January I have been working with the Teens at Patterson High School to create portraits with them. In the process we are learning about scale, observation and representation. We discuss symbols and designs that represent characteristics of what illustrate who they are, what they would like people to know about who they are. And then design, draw the symbols around the background.
These workshops are ongoing, I continue to create the portraits and do parallel teaching with teens as I create them, either of them or while I paint their peers.
I love working with this group!
Alexis Iammarino is working with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (LLDE) in Takoma Park, MD.
Co-president of Teen Exchange, Talia Mason greeting prospective partcipants at an open house this past September.
Working as a community artist-in-residence at Dance Exchange and at Patterson High School, in East Baltimore, I reflect and analyze the philosophies and methodologies of both LLDE / MACA through my own artmaking and research facilitating in distinct communities (within different socio-cultural traditions). I position the sensibility of dance and convening around arts related youth empowerment to organize and seek out HS youth invested in leading elementary youth into their own art making, dance making and team building processes.
Beginning this Novemember I began co-facilitating with my fellow MACAn, Anne Kotleba, at Raynor Browne Academy in East Baltimore. We work together to build upon existing after school programming in chess, sports and dance by integrating the visual and performance arts.
Drawing relay races :Anne Kotleba and youth from Dr. Rayner Browne Academy
Faciliation by Alexis and Anne, Photographs courtesy of Jessica Wyatt.
As part of my AmeriCorps residency I partner with the Y of Central Maryland to offer dance and art workshops to High School Students enrolled in BOOST programing at Patterson High School and Dr. Rayner Browne Academy in East Baltimore.
This partnership was made possible through organizing with, my CAC advisor Frankie Gamber, Kate Scherr of The Family League of Baltimore City and Eric Ford with the Y of Central Marylans and Community Schools. As mentinoed here in a City Paper article by Andrea Appleton, in November:
"Ford has brought a variety of programs to Patterson, including a truancy court program that brings in volunteer judges to work with students who are often absent, and a “mini med school,” in which graduate students from the University of Maryland School of Medicine give guest lectures. On a recent school day, Ford was looking for hospital bed donations for the Certified Nursing Assistant program, which was short a few, and talking with a volunteer from the Maryland Institute College [MACA student Alexis Iammarino] of Art about a possible dance class incorporating the visual arts."
Alexis preparing the felt loops for large-scale human loom activities.
January 2011.
The weaving projects are proposed as a way to explore collaborative art making and to develop skills designing art-work/performance that will be executed by several individuals.