This collaborative, immersive work, performed by two men with different racial and cultural backgrounds, preferences the value of bodies coexisting – sharing weight and responsibility, dancing to become better ancestors. As Wilkins travel to make and share this work, he will stitch together a dance-quilt to broaden our understandings of what it means to be American and sew ourselves together anew.

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The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging is an ongoing and always shifting dance-quilt, confronting and celebrating heritage, resilience, justice, and hope. The multi-year work will require Wilkins travel to all 50 U.S. states/D.C./5 inhabited territories and realize four specific media outcomes:

• Choreographic works will be developed that connect dance-quilt patches created in and with intergenerational community members in a non-colonizing fashion. When sewn together these quilts will present as informal community rituals in site-specific, public spaces and formal performances.

• A digital humanities living archive will be developed exposing multi-sensory experiences of belonging that course corrects American history.

• A documentary film that examines a perspective of a nation’s soul through the performer’s perseverance and resilience in working together toward a different future will be developed.

• Finally, Wilkins will create a toykit (a toolkit implies a need to fix, a toykit represents an invitation to co-create and participate in a process of uniting and healing) for community-based embodied diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice work. This toykit can be used by other artists across the country to continue the process of manifesting a more socially just America at the heart of The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging.