Dancing Conversation: Is All The World A Stage?

Join NCCAkron at The Nightlight Cinema for a screening of excerpts from internationally renowned choreographer/director Raja Feather Kelly’s “dystopian docu-fiction melodrama” dance-theatre production Bunny Bunny.

Executive/Artistic Director Christy Bolingbroke will host a conversation with Kelly, local Akron choreographer Dominic Moore-Dunson, and Director of the University Galleries at Myers School of Art Arnold Tunstall. No dance background is necessary to join this conversation!

Dancing Conversations are free public events that locate dance among broader topics and offer an opportunity to demonstrate the aesthetic range, power, and possibilities of dance. All our Dancing Conversations — on dance & music, women & witchcraft, Black male choreographers, queer movements, and more — are available on NCCAkron’s YouTube channel.

Bunny Bunny is a fantasy of seven bunny rabbits running away from home and having their lives surveilled. The project appropriates reality television, celebrity culture, and social media, the work celebrates and criticizes popular media while creating a surreal and dystopian docu-fiction melodrama. The work premiered in February 2023, written, directed, and choreographed by UC San Diego Quinn Martin Fellow Raja Feather Kelly.

Raja Feather Kelly (Brooklyn, NY) is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory, for which he has created 18 premieres, most recently UGLY Part 3: BLUE at the Chelsea Factory. The company’s latest work, The Absolute Future, will premiere in 2024. His choreography can currently be seen in White Girl in Danger at the Second Stage Kiser Theater, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. He also choreographed Jackson’s Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) winner of two Tony Awards, including Best Musical. In addition to Jackson and Blain-Cruz, his Off-Broadway collaborators include Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sarah Benson. Among many recent works are the Pulitzer Prize-winning productions Fairview and A Strange Loop. In addition to White Girl in Danger, current projects include Lempicka and The Listeners. Recent works include Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego) and Scenes for an Ending for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. His accolades include Princeton Arts Fellowship, three Princess Grace Awards, an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle honor, a Creative Capital award, and many others. thefeath3rtheory.com

Dominic Moore-Dunson (Akron, OH) is the Executive Producer of DMD Productions, a Co-founder, with his wife Ashley, of THRIVE Leadership & Team Consulting, and the host of inCOPnegro: Black & Blue Podcast. He is a Co-founder of the Akron Black Artist Guild and a graduate of the National Arts Strategies’ Executive Program for Arts & Culture Strategies at the University of Pennsylvania. Dominic's work has earned him acclaim, including recognition as a 2021 Top 40 finalist for the National Dance Project Production Grant. He's been an Associate Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts, received the 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize's Emerging Artist Award for Theatre & Dance, and was a 2019 fellow of The Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Program at Jacob’s Pillow. He's also deeply involved with the National Choreography Center at The University of Akron as a Creative Research Residency Artist and Creative Administration Research Fellow. dommooredun.com

Arnold Tunstall (Akron, OH) worked for the Akron Art Museum in various curatorial positions since 1985 and served as the Collections Manager and Registrar from 1994 to 2016, prior to becoming Director, University Galleries. Select museum projects included curating exhibitions (Proof, Danny Lyons' Bikeriders), managing a national tour of the work of sculptor El Anatsui, and managing a multi-year project to digitize the museum collection and to make it available online. Tunstall is also on the board of directors of SPACES Gallery in Cleveland and the Akron Soul Train. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Akron, majoring in Graphic Design and Photography, and he received his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from The Ohio University. Tunstall has also taught as an adjunct professor at The University of Akron, in the Myers School of Art, preceding his current work with the Arts Administration graduate program. Tunstall is active throughout the NE Ohio region with curatorial projects and continues to create and exhibit his own artwork.

Bunny Bunny was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

Photo credit: Alex Kikis