A part of Bates Dance Festival's epic performance series! :

A carcass leaves an imprint of a version of us we are no longer, a “skin,” a container that we have “left behind”. Like the residue of the body’s presence, the residue of our carcasses resonate with layered experience. Space Carcasses gathers experience embedded in the walls of hundreds of years old buildings separated by oceans and floating in the dust of thousands of years of the earth redistributing itself…and asserts the body’s capacity to wear it all, what we made, what was made of us, where we were, where we are. Like a garment. And like a garment, also perhaps, to take it off.

Since 1997, alongside a career in arts education leadership, Onye has been presenting choreographic work nationally and internationally at venues such as Seattle Festival of Improvisational Dance (WA), Kaay Fecc Festival Des Tous les Danses (Dakar, Senegal), La Festival del Caribe (Santiago, Cuba), McKenna Museum of African American Art (New Orleans, LA), and danceGATHERING (Lagos, Nigeria). Recent work includes Touch My Beloved’s Thought, a collaboration with composer Greg Ward and Project Tool.

Space Carcasses is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), The QDance Center (Lagos, Nigeria), Hope Mohr Dance – The Bridge Project (San Francisco, CA) and NPN. For more information: www.npnweb.org. Space Carcasses was also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in part through an NCCAkron Research Residency and an EMPAC Production Residency.