Art loft is brought to you by the Friends of South Florida PBS.

Art loft.

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, Movement and Power, we meet an all abilities dance company breaking barriers in performance.

We visited an exhibit celebrating the art of boxing.

Founding Wu-Tang clan member RZA takes on classical ballet in his latest work.

And we explore an arts residency program bringing dozens of artists from around the globe to work in Miami every year.

Karen Peterson and Dancers are a barrier breaking dance company that's been in practice for over three decades.

The company's focus is on physically integrated dance that includes those with and without disabilities.

Peterson's vision is that through dance, we can better understand our common humanity.

There's something very real about having all different body types dancing together.

And that, like, we all have limits that that's a it's not like a detriment to have some sort of physical, like every single one of us has some sort of physical limit.

And to, to show that in performance to me feels really like empowering of just the human body in general.

And to be like dance is joy and connection.

And we all have different limits and we can still dance together and be on stage also.

My goodness, I've been doing this for the past 30 years.

So obviously there's something that keeps me coming back to this.

Yeah, this season I knew that I wanted to work with the four dancers.

Usually I have a larger company.

This is a small group this year, so we had a lot of time.

And with that freedom of the time, I think we were very creative.

I love to watch audience's faces just to see their response.

You know, it's really good to have an audience as a tryout just to see, oh, I think they might like this, or they might be engaged by the work.

I want to make sure that the audiences are engaged or moved in some way.

Happy.

Sad.

Emotional.

Upbeat.

It's all there, but it's like a whirlwind where you just feel like, oh, this is great.

Oh, this is so sad.

Oh, this is so beautiful and this is so rocking.

It’s all mixed in one.

Mixed together.

I usually have some simple idea and we improvise and I'll say, okay, Adam and Erica, try this.

Now, don't try that.

Try this.

Can you do this faster?

Can you turn it around?

It’s a trial and error discovery between me and the dancers.

We just explore each other and something.

One day I just jumped in the hotel.

Then I feel like, oh, I'm sorry, but can I try?

Then we got some ideas about popping each other.

It's okay, can I it's okay, can I?

Then we mixed it.

My name is Mark Travis Rivera.

I am an independent disabled choreographer based in Atlanta, Georgia, but I was born and grew up in Wynwood in Miami.

Storytelling is a through line of all that I do, which is why I call myself a professional storyteller.

And for me, movement isn't just about moving for the sake of moving.

There's a story, there's a narrative.

There's a reason.

There's a cause and effect.

There's a metaphor with the body.

What is the story within our bodies are trying to tell.

Right.

And so for me, telling stories I believe can be used to create a more inclusive world.

And we do that in dance by working with disabled and non-disabled dancers.

For some people in the non-disabled dance world, um, you know, the choreographers aren't always disabled oftentimes, and so they're approaching it differently.

But for disability dance in particular, it's about using the bodies we have and creating exquisite art.

Before I joined many years ago, I didn't know how to even think of dancing with a partner or another wheelchair, or even an able bodied with a wheelchair.

I just never even wouldn't have even thought about it.

Then when I first saw KPD, Karen Peterson and dancers and actually Marjorie was the first one I saw, that's what immediately got me interested.

The first time that I saw KPD, the thing that moved me the most is it was such a beautiful dance.

And simultaneously it was kind of like this redefinition of what we think of as beauty per se in dance, because there's a lot of like very particular or strict movement and process in the traditional dance world.

And it's really nice to collaborate and be like, oh, we're creating this beautiful thing together.

Like your body is just as beautiful as your body is, just as beautiful as my body.

And we can communicate about it and make something together that's really beautiful.

It made me realize how much most days I become alive.

I become whole, you know?

So that's the difference between me and my life.

I never think about that.

We have this.

Everybody here.

It's just to connect each other's body type.

Different body type.

We're moving together.

We mix, mingle together and make happen together.

For me, it is about speaking the human experience through movement, through our bodies, is an embodiment of the human spirit.

I think some people try to diminish the contribution of disabled artists, but I'm here to remind people that disabled people can dance and choreograph, and we can do so well.

Nothing is impossible.

Even though it looks like, you know, fun and passion and all that.

But it is hard work.

But it's a it's a it's a job well done at the end.

And that we love the zoo, right?

Physically integrated dance is not going away.

It is developing around the world.

It's developing around the country, and it's a dance form that's here to stay.

This season at the Norton Museum in West Palm.

You can check out a dance of a different kind.

The one that happens in the boxing ring.

The exhibition Strike Fast, Dance Lightly Artists on Boxing shares over 120 works celebrating the centuries old sport.

This exhibition is really more than it is about boxing.

It's really about a lived experience.

So many different artists, coming from so many different worlds and backgrounds and experiences, have found that the aesthetics of boxing represent a channel for which the artist can articulate their emotional experiences, their lived experiences, a tool for free speech.

I'm Arden Sherman, the Glenn W and Cornelia T Bailey, senior curator of contemporary art at the Norton Museum of Art.

The exhibition concept has been one that I've ruminated on for years.

It has been something that I've took notice to.

As I met with artists, I visited galleries, I went to museums and art fairs, and I noticed that the imagery of boxing was a reoccurring theme in much of the artwork I was seeing.

I kept a list and built the exhibition from that over the course of the last few years.

In that planning process, I was informed that two other institutions also were thinking about artists on boxing.

We felt that it was best to collaborate.

And what we have are three unique exhibitions.

One shared title, one shared theme, and one shared book.

Our partners are the flag Art Foundation in New York City and the church SAG Harbor in Long Island.

The exhibition title comes from a poem by the Italian poet Gabriele Tinti, and was inspired by a ancient Greek sculpture housed inside of the National Museum of Rome.

The sculpture is called Seated Boxer.

This poem is written from the perspective of the seated boxer inside the ring as he navigates through the emotional experience of a fight.

The exhibition contains over 120 artworks that range from the 19th century to today.

You'll see a variety of media as you walk through the gallery spaces, from painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation and some more experimental methods as well.

What's so exciting about the sport of boxing is how universal it is.

Our audiences will encounter very famous names like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to more emerging figures like Sherwin Rio and Caleb Quintana.

One of the noteworthy works is by the artist Gary Simmons.

For Simmons, boxing is a reoccurring theme in his art practice.

In this case, the work is called Boston Tar Baby, and it is a very large-scale painting with white letters written on a black background.

The font of the artwork is in a font that could be likened to early 20th century Boston.

Tar baby is the moniker for the fighter Sam Langford.

Sam Langford came to prominence in the early 20th century, and he is coined as the greatest boxer you'll never know.

What's interesting about this is that it's the largest work in the whole show, but yet it pays tribute to an underrepresented voice.

It's a bit of a memorial piece, if you will, because of racial discrimination and because of the times where boxing was still quite a clandestine underground sport.

He was not able to climb the ranks to become what would have been the greatest boxer and a and a heavyweight champion.

But what I love about this is how Simmons has chosen to pay tribute to this history, and to this under cherished voice.

Muhammad Ali was so much more than the greatest boxer.

He was an activist, a poet, a musician, and a visual artist.

We're so honored to be able to present four works by Ali himself.

There are two drawings made in 1967 during the height of his career.

And in those drawings, there's a depiction of a crowd from the vantage point of being inside of the ring.

And the second one is of overview perspective.

Accompanying those two works are two later pieces made in 2011.

Again, we see a repetition of the crowd and the ring and these two later Presenting these two works from 2011 alongside the historic works, demonstrates the cycle that was on constant loop inside of Ali's mind, his obsession with the sport itself, how it never seemed to leave him even in those later years when his health was declining.

This is a work by the artist Rosemary Cromwell.

Rosemary is a photographer currently based in Miami, Florida.

Rosemary Cromwell's piece is part of our section that's dedicated to women in boxing.

Now, women have always been in boxing.

They just have not received the recognition that their male counterparts have.

It felt necessary for us to highlight this history inside of our exhibition experience.

For this series.

She gained access to Cuba after over a year of trying, she was granted access to go as a documentarian and take photographs of the female boxers as they prepare to try out for the Olympics.

This was the first time that the government of Cuba allowed for the women fighters to participate in the Olympic Trials.

What we see here are very beautiful and powerful behind the scenes images of these women as they practice and gear up for those fights because of the state of Cuba.

They're not only fighting for themselves and making a mark on the global stage, but also within Cuba itself and its harsh government restrictions.

And so they are dealing with the limitations in resources, as well as the kind of conceptual limitations of being women inside of a strict government environment.

In our presentation of Strike Fast and Slightly, we have two works by the most famous American painter of boxing, George Bellows, himself.

We have one work from his earlier series, made in 1907 called Club Night.

And we have another work from his later series of 1923 called Introducing John L Sullivan.

While bellows was known as the greatest American painter of boxing, he only made six paintings depicting the sport.

The earlier work of the two Club night from 1907, is painted from the perspective of a front row seat inside of one of the clandestine boxing clubs of New York City called Sharkey's.

Bellows had access to the club through his network, and it was very near his studio, so he would frequently go there and make these very raw, emotional Paintings.

In the later work from 1923, we see Bellow's fascination with the showmanship around the sport.

We see an elderly John L Sullivan being brought out and paraded about by promoters and the announcer himself before a boxing match.

The style of this later work is a bit more refined than some of the earlier works, and we see this in the later years of Bellow's practice, where he's articulating his subjects in a bit more of a clean, more confident approach.

I hope that visitors leave this exhibition experience with a newfound sense of understanding how powerful imagery can be for articulating a message, and in this case, the imagery of boxing.

It's such a raw, basic instinct to just fight for what you believe in.

I think that what we see is how artists are doing that.

The Fountainhead Arts residency program is going strong.

Every year, the nonprofit brings over 30 artists from around the globe to spend a month working and sharing their practice here in Miami.

What am I doing?

I'm holding a baby alligator.

This is crazy.

Who am I.

Getting away from the day-to-day kind of responsibilities?

Of being at home is a real luxury, and then being really immersed with an incredible set of artists is another huge luxury under this framework that's constructed by an incredible group of people to help artists flourish and that believe in art and believe in artists.

The ideas I've been able to form living in a new place for the first time without my normal life responsibilities are so generative that most nights I'm falling asleep and like jotting up in bed to write down 1 or 2 ideas for something to work on when I get back to LA for my solo show.

And that's a really great feeling to have enough time to have these ideas swirling in your head and then want to take action.

I sometimes tell people that art happens outside of the studio, so getting to know and being a part of and experience things is kind of the important part for me.

And there's things that will build into some kind of archive in my own photos and my own laptop.

Like all these photos I've taken of handmade signs, hand-painted murals on buildings, or painted words on buildings to say the name of the store, like all these things are just so valuable to me and for my practice.

My time at Fountainhead has been truly incredible and invaluable.

It's the first time I've gotten to share my practice in the US.

It's also probably one of the most incredible things I've ever done in the history of my work.

I'm so, so freaking.

Grateful to be here.

Recently, the artist Andrea Ferrero spent a month at Fountainhead focusing on taking classical architectural elements associated with power and recreating them in a surprising new medium.

I am really interested in creating fictional narratives or scenarios that provoke exercises of collective imagination.

My practice centers on iconographies of power and our relationship with them.

I try to find playful ways of signifying and reevaluating symbols that have been inserted into urban landscapes, build space, and embedded in a way into collective consciousness.

Symbols in architecture that perpetuate narratives of power that the audience is then invited to kind of ruin and destroy.

I work mainly across sculpture, and most recently I have incorporated edible materials such as sugar, chocolate, gelatin, sometimes to create immersive installations that invite the audience to actively participate in the destruction of these symbols through consuming, eating, digesting, metabolizing, and ultimately excreting them to fantasize with the idea of destroying these elements of power and domination.

New York native RZA is many things rapper, record producer, composer and founding member of the famous hip-hop collective Wu-Tang clan.

Here, the artist discusses a ballet through mud, His first classical record.

Mud, is looked to be dirty.

Yet out of the mud grows, the lotus grows life.

But for this album here, I think I started jotting down a lot of the ideas in 2020, and I had found a book of old lyrics and these old lyrics.

I would read them, and these are lyrics that go back to when I was like 15 or 16 years old.

And so I started writing music to kind of help tell the story of my youth.

But as the music started developing, taking a life of its own, it became more obvious that this was more of a ballet that I was writing.

It could be his own thing.

It didn't need all these lyrics that I had planned to put with it.

Instead, I opted to have it expressed through just music and dance.

Tony Pierce and Dustin.

We had talked about me becoming part of their Imagination Artist series.

The thing was, I told them in the beginning that, you know, the first year would be this would be that, but I want to do something original.

I don't want to just do Wu-Tang music and things that I've created.

I want to create something new and original, and it's okay when you're ready.

And in this ballet became it.

And I was ready and I took it to them, and we performed it with dancers and orchestras and visuals.

There was a great personal achievement NAS, Busta, Wu-Tang, and we always like having such a brotherly moment.

They all talked about recording some music together and we were like, yo, we should have a studio bus.

On the second half of the tour, we paid for a studio bus to come and it happens to be the John Lennon Educational Bus.

And Dolby had just put in this whole new Atmos system into this bus.

Nobody came in and made a song.

When I realized that it was a chance that that wasn't going to happen, I was like, you know what?

No matter what, I'll come here every night.

And if anybody else comes, we'll do hip hop.

If nobody else comes, we're going to mix this album in Dolby Atmos.

When you do an orchestra.

Orchestra has a certain way they sit and the music comes at you from a certain dynamic based on that setting.

And the mix in stereo is based upon that kind of stereophonic sound you're hoping to get as the orchestra projects itself throughout the room.

But in Dolby Atmos.

You could break all those rules.

If the horn player is here in the beginning of the song, can we put him over here by the end?

Now, in a real orchestra, a horn player will never get up and walk over to there.

Okay.

But in Dolby Atmos mix, he was out.

He was able to do that.

So this album, which I think is special, that's mixed not only in Dolby Atmos, but actually using Dolby Atmos as a creative tool.

No, we're actually moving the instruments and moving the players throughout the mix to make you go like this.

You know what I mean?

And that was something that came about without planning.

We didn't plan that.

The first thing that enamored me about music was hip hop itself.

Hip hop has found this way to inspire the world.

I would advise young people to take the path that hip hop gives you.

Pick up your drum machine, pick up your Fruityloops look so your Pro Tools, whatever you're doing.

But pick up an instrument because the understanding of the instrument is going to help you understand the creativity of what you're doing.

It's going to take you to a level of creativity that can be uniquely yours.

This album is no samples.

It's all musicians playing this music.

The recording that we release is not the same recording that we first tried, because each time we played it, there's something different happening because the human hand moved different.

There's a different amplitude.

There's a different expression.

There's a different embellishment or flourish.

There's also something in the stimulation of your own brain.

That instrument gives us, you know, that self-expression.

And so this is a ballet through mud, like, yeah, maybe even my own past has been muddy, starting in the streets of Staten Island, Brooklyn, living the, you know, the street life as we did, bringing the.

What.

Is this?

You know, Wu-Tang clan and going through that mud, but then evolving, you know, to a Lotus, you know.

And the thing about a lotus is that even though it grows with so many things that could be considered the foul around it, it maintains to keep its purity.

Art loft is on Instagram at Art loft SFL.

Tag us on your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments and more at Art loft, SFL and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

Art loft is brought to you by the Friends of South Florida PBS.