The Sahel: a Crack in the Heart

This performance highlights social tensions as a result of desertification in the Sahel region of Africa.

Re-inspired

This piece quotes the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Barack Obama to depict the political scene we have grown from and the progressive future we have the potential to create.

Ripples in Motion

This site-specific performance highlights our personal impact on the planet while revealing the fragile beauty of nature and humanity’s relationship to it.

Stories and Snapshots

This performance highlights the ongoing problems of indifference, explores how it is manifested, challenges its causes, and finds new ways to inspire action and solutions.
 

Archive Information:

The Sahel A Crack In The Heart
Modern Dance Performance
Directed By Christina Coleman
50 Minute Work

"The Sahel is a line. But it is also a crack in the heart-a tightrope, a brink a ledge. See how its people walk: straight-backed and on paths of red dust, placing one foot carefully before the other, as if balanced upon a knife edge. The Sahel is a bullet’s trajectory. It is the tracks of rain that fall but never touch the sand...It is a call for your blood, and for me a desert road without end."

- Paul Salopek
 

- Humanity transcends culture, religion, race and nationality. While set in The Sahel, the music, the movement, the characters and the costumes signify the universality of the human condition. It could happen anywhere.
 

- The performance we are creating is on the desertification of the Sahel region, a vast area of Africa. This region, just south of the Sahara Desert, occurs at the fault line of Arabic and African cultures. The problem of encroaching desert (which, it must be acknowledged, is not universally accepted), continues to disrupt the lives of millions of innocent people. In this artistic endeavor we can use the powerful, expressive potential of dance to portray these current life-and-death issues.
 

- We are not only addressing the issue of desertification, but we are also showing the many underlying factors that are at work here as well. We are doing character studies, depicting the role of the West, looking at the many cultures who live in the area, identifying the religions in the Sahel, recognizing the issues with property rights, illuminating the catastrophic results of desertification such as starvation, social conflict, and death and finally identifying the overall toll that desertification is taking on those who are left alive.