“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain,
free within ourselves.”– Langston Hughes
free within ourselves.”– Langston Hughes
Dance Theatre X serves as the creative platform for Charles O. Anderson’s kinetic storytelling projects. Through this project-driven entity Anderson recruits project-specific ensembles of guest artists who collaborate with him as dancers/performers, designers, and scholars during the creative and touring life of a project. Founded in 2003 in Philadelphia, PA and now based in Austin, TX, COAD Project’s mission is to examine, promote, and enact liberatory aesthetic practices that provide space for social reflection, commentary, and critique in service to social justice. Through “slashing yet lush, lyrical movements [that] weave with texts from literary heavyweights like W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill,” (Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Dance Magazine) Dance Theatre X’s goal is to create multi-disciplinary and inter-cultural dance-theatre and humanities projects that combat deeply entrenched generalized stereotypes by showing specific humanity and specific acts of humanity.
The choreographed works are rooted in kinetic storytelling. We are invested in creating pieces that serve as movement-driven testimonies of lived experience. Conjuring is the method through which which we develop these testimonies. Conjuring is taking what may seem like disparate ideas or movement elements and investigating their potential for meaning in service to a larger choreographic and socio-political idea.
