Moss Arts Center partners with Candoco Dance Company

My name is Dominic Mitchell. I'm the co artistic director at Canduco Dance Company based in London. So Canduco is a dance company that works with disabled and non disabled dancers, and it started with a series of workshops and series of exploration of how the knowledges of disabled dancers could be expressed and can be represented in sort of the mainstream context of contemporary dance. We had the awesome opportunity to teach at Intro to dance here at Virginia Tech. What was amazing is that many of the students had different study backgrounds, different interests, different approaches. Some people had dance background, others didn't, so it was a nice mix of different types of students. It was a crash course, essentially, where 30 minutes, we quickly gave them a series of exercises or things that we would do in a Candoco class. What's really important to me also is sharing the values and the philosophical approach to how we create an integrated dance class. I'm so pleased and proud to see the engagement that we had with the Candoco artists. These are people who are thinking about access and inclusion in dynamic ways and also really wanting to share with others the value of bringing that kind of thinking into their own lives into their own creative and artistic practice. I feel grateful for the fact that the Moss offers a lot of various interactive experiences with artists that come to campus. For an hour on a Tuesday when I could be, you know, writing a chapter. Instead, I chose not to, reminding myself that as important as academics and scholarship are, if I'm not taking those moments for artistic awareness, personal reflection, then I'm probably not actually serving the work that I'm doing. We were paired with the same partner for a lot of the experience. One partner would move in whatever way they felt, and then they would pause in some kind of position. The other partner would then meet them where they were, but in their own particular way. So, since I use a cane, when she would have sort of both hands up, I instead would have one hand up, but it felt like we were both sort of doing the same kind of exultant exercise together. It felt like a really particularly fun experience. We had the awesome chance to visit the Embodied Brain Lab. It's really exciting to witness their practice, as well as Paulina being able to wear one of the helmets that tracks her brain waves as she moves through various choreographic practices, especially with me really focusing on our learning branch and how we can investigate an interdisciplinary approach to our practice. It's critical to have these kinds of engagements because students come to Virginia Tech from all over the world. And one of the beautiful things about being a university is the chance to meet with and be with people who are different from you. Increasingly, I come across young people who have not experienced live arts or who have never had the opportunity to engage with artistic practices that are different from their own cultural background. The Moss makes that within reach. What's really exciting about collaborations with organizations such as the Moss Arts Center is being able to foster new ideas and new possibilities. So the students at Virginia Tech can feed into their learning while also feeding into ours and allowing us to continue to innovate and to think differently and to have a new approach or new angle. Super exciting.