Davalois Fearon Dance To Premiere UP/RIGHT At Vision Festival 2025

Davalois Fearon Dance will premiere Up/right at the 2025 Vision Festival, presented by ArtsForArts, with support from the Bronx Council on the Arts Cultural Vision Fund and Dance Fund.

This year's Vision Festival celebrates freedom, resilience, and creativity with the theme, heART to RESIST. Embodying these ideas with a dance that critically engages with history and identity, Up/right features choreographer Davalois Fearon alongside collaborators Mike McGinnis (clarinet, sax), Adriel Vincent-Brown (drums), Peter Apfelbaum (piano), Patricia Smith (poetry), and dancers Jalisa Wallerson, Marýa Wethers, and Myssi Robinson (video art).

Up/right is a multi-disciplinary dance piece that aims to integrate Davalois Fearon's research on non-Western African diasporic forms with her professional concert dance career as a master's level, academically trained artist. It explores how cross-cultural movements, mainly stemming from the African diaspora, have shaped the development of contemporary dance and celebrates the forms that helped build American dance, often without acknowledgment or credit. This work challenges the longstanding exclusion of non-Western movement traditions in concert dance and questions the biases that have historically privileged Eurocentric forms.

Part of the Finding Herstory Project, Up/right is a direct outgrowth of Segregated Me, a solo that explores how racial segregation in America has influenced the field of dance, given the existence of dance and "Black Dance" as distinct genres. Segregated Me juxtaposes movements generated from the pelvis and spine-hallmarks of Black dance-versus movement initiated from the arms and legs with an upright spine, characteristics of European dance forms such as ballet. Up/right, however, moves beyond contrast, presenting an Integrated Me, where these movement vocabularies coexist freely.

The choreography flows seamlessly between movement vocabularies, signifying Fearon's Afro-Jamaican-informed postmodern/contemporary style. In Up/right, Afro-Jamaican dance traditions-such as Kumina, Doundounba, Congolese, Ska, Reggae, and Dancehall-are fully integrated with postmodern and contemporary aesthetics and approaches. This blending challenges the segregation Fearon has experienced between these forms in concert dance, actively resisting the systemic forces that have marginalized and erased Afro-diasporic influences from dominant narratives of American dance history.

By premiering Up/right at the Vision Festival, a platform known for showcasing multicultural, Black, and improvisational creative arts, Fearon continues her commitment to pushing artistic and social boundaries.

About Davalois Fearon Dance:

Davalois Fearon Dance was founded in November 2016 with a mission to collaboratively create, perform, and teach a versatile body of work that pushes both artistic and social boundaries. The company's work draws from Ms. Fearon's richly diverse movement vocabulary and aims to cultivate the next generation of dance artists. Her choreography is often driven by the intent to confront complex issues and prompt contemplation. Multimedia elements are used to carry audiences on a journey of ideas. Fearon's work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at New York City venues such as the Joyce Theatre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BAAD, and the New Victory Theater. Among many others, she has completed commissions for the Harlem Stage, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Barnard College. Her awards include Mosaic Network & Fund (2022), DanceNYC's Dance Advancement Fund Award (2020-22), Howard Gilman Foundation Grant (2023), MAP Fund (2019). She has received residency support from the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2024) and the Wassac Project (2023), and has received continuous support from the Bronx Council on the Arts since 2014. Fearon has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Dance Magazine, in poet Ntozake Shange's book, Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance, in the documentary If the Dancer Dances, in the book A Year of Black Joy by Jamia Wilson, and most recently on The Story Project podcast hosted by Jessica Altchiler.

About Davaois Fearon

Davalois Fearon is a Bessie-awarded, critically acclaimed choreographer, dancer, and educator. Her dancing, praised by colleagues as "unapologetic" and by critics as "electrifying," was honed over 12 years with the Stephen Petronio Company (2005-2017), where she was an audience favorite for her bold performances. Born in Jamaica and raised in the Bronx, Fearon's choreography is said to embody a "tenacious virtuosity" that is now reflected in her work as founder and director of Davalois Fearon Dance (DFD). Established in 2016, DFD pushes artistic and social boundaries to provoke contemplation and address societal issues. She holds an MFA in dance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a BFA from SUNY Purchase. She is currently a Core Faculty Lecturer at Princeton University's dance department.

About the Vision Festival:

Presented annually by Arts for Art, the Vision Festival is a leading multidisciplinary arts festival that celebrates innovation in music, dance, and visual arts. The 2025 edition honors legendary musician Roscoe Mitchell, a pioneering figure in creative music.