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work
Helanius J Wilkins uses performance-making to re-frame perspectives and creative practices and link the arts with social justice, blurring the lines between performer and audience.
The merging of movement, film, sound, and visuals create portals to reconfigure our relationships to ourselves (and each other) and environments around us.
Current Work
2022-present
Available for touring
A dance-based geopolitical “quilt”, stitching together uncertain relentless trajectories to disrupt the erasure of silenced stories. A multimedia, multi-year project across the U.S. that builds paths in a non-colonizing fashion towards justice and equitable landscapes.
2012-present
Available for touring
2012-present
no longer Available for touring
Ritual Gumbo: A Passage disrupts the practice of erasing the past by shining a light on representation through re-bodying our silenced stories, people, and places. It exposes a tarnished and turbulent American history to resuscitate the people who survived the slave trade, floods, and lost rituals whose perseverance and resilience offer hope for a different future.
SCREENDANCE
EntangleMEN: from the dugout is a film that centers on a male duet exploring coexistence through an exhaustive collision course of in-between states. Wheat fields, spillway infrastructures, and baseball dugouts on indigenous territories of Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute Nations set the scenes for this viscerally charged work.
SCREENDANCE
Through the fusion of text, movement, layered visuals, and sound, DIRT is a screendance that presents a meditative exploration of identity and Blackness in a heightened time of unrest and uprisings fueled by issues of police brutality and systemic racism in America.
past Work & archives
Multiscapes is a journey of human connection revealed through an interactive installation that blends dance, technology, design and sound. The project centers on a male duet, and explores uncertainty and intimacy through visually and sonically active environments. With no seats provided, audience members move around the space throughout the performance, including negotiating an “effort corridor”—a sensorial playground of balloons and puzzles—to unlock the unexpected.
EDGEWORKS Dance Theater, an all-male company of predominantly African American men, aimed to break down stereotypes through dance. EDGEWORKS provided a variety of arts education services and programming that challenge perceptions of men, shatter stereotypes as a means to build community, and create projects that blur the lines between art and social justice.
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