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Susan Banyas is a dancer, storyteller, and writer whose artistic roots as an improviser, dancer, and experimental performance artist led to collaborations through SO&SO&SO&SO Inc. Her current performance project, No Strangers Here Today,is on tour in 2008. Her current book-in-progress, The Hillsboro Story, is a non-fiction narrative that begins outside her third grade classroom window shortly after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. Both projects are centered in Highland County, Ohio, and dance between memory, American history, and on-going cultural detective work. She recently presented Everyday Dancing, A Dance Lecture at the International Society for the Study of Time conference in Monterey, CA and is developing the work into a photography installation and dance/theatre piece.
She co-founded Dreams Well Studio (1991-2003), a low tech performance and teaching laboratory, where she produced and directed poetry shows, Soul Stories evenings, dance/theatre pieces, and gender-inspired shows in collaboration with some of Portland's finest theatre artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. The studio was home to her innovative classes and workshops, which she continues to offer in various venues. She has also taught extensively in schools, colleges, and universities and is a creative consultant to organizations and individuals.
She has published essays on art and politics and is currently a member of the Maya Angelou Writers Guild in Portland. Music/spoken word CDs, visual books and image cards from her scripts, short stories, paintings, and photography emerge from the improvisation experiments at the heart of art practice. Her work fuses movement, language, and music into physical images that "speak" about the times we live in, the encounters we experience, and the memory places we inhabit.
- www.susanbaynas.com
Please visit this site to learn more about Susan's "No Strangers Here Today", "The Hillsboro Story", and SO&SO&SO&SO productions. Click IS, then Susan's name when you get to her site.
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| Elizabeth Edwards, Susan Baynas' Great, Great Grandmother |
No Strangers Here Today was a coded message in the diary of Elizabeth Edwards, a Quaker farmwoman whose family was a link in the clandestine, bi-racial resistance movement, known as the Underground Railroad. Elizabeth’s great-great granddaughter, Susan Banyas, teams with jazz composer David Ornette Cherry, to deliver a powerful movement based monologue with live music that links American history, memory and the activist’s spirit.
Elizabeth Edwards’ diary entries are the heartbeat of this epic American story, evoking imaginative detail of place and time, her motherly concern for her son, a soldier in the Union Army, and the quietly coded references to her political and spiritual activism. The elegant music and movement-spoken word compositions affirm the legacy of the Underground Railroad, a commitment to uphold human rights and oppose economic, political and personal tyranny by the ruling elite.
Early doctrine of the Society of Friends, who settled in the new colonies in 1682, states without compromise: “War is incompatible with the Christian spirit. Slavery must be eradicated.” By opposing the “binding character of authority,” the doctrine connected the dots between war, power and oppression, a philosophy echoed today by anti-war activist, Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and NY Times bureau chief in the Middle East. “Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war.” he writes. “The return of historical memory restores a common language to the one usurped by war.” No Strangers Here Today is written in solidarity with the Ancestors who lived through those times and inspire
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| Susan Banyas and David Ornette Cherry |
One-woman Show Evokes Abolition Era Susan Banyas' "No Strangers Here Today" Details the Underground Railroad
Susan Banyas' method is fitting for material that turns on the power of individual consciousness. She's not quite alone onstage: Musician David Ornette Cherry, switching between a keyboard and an Apple laptop, provides spare piano meditations reminiscent of Harold Budd, beat-enhanced African chants and other atmospheric accompaniment. But the focus is on Banyas, who combines gesture, dance and a text woven from personal recollection, historical research and the fascinating coded language of her great-great grandmother's antebellum diary... Sometimes her movements are inscrutable, but never enough so to derail the fascinating story she has to tell... It's a stirring portrait of abolitionist effort, and illuminating morally and historically.
- Marty Hughley, Oregonian
Dancer-writer Susan Banyas’ new performance work, The Hillsboro Story, is a warmhearting, hard-hitting narrative, set in the writer’s Ohio hometown, near the Mason Dixon Line, during one of America’s most powerful turning points. On July 5, 1954, the "colored" elementary school went up in flames and the sweet sleepy segregated mid-west town was suddenly awake. The fire sparked a "school fight" led by five “Negro” mothers, which lasted two years and became the first test case for the Brown v. Board of Education decision (May, 1954) in the North. Ms. Banyas was in the third grade, and the memory of the marching mothers outside Mrs. Mallory’s window, sparked this cultural detective story. Based on extensive interviews over several years with key players in the story, as well as national figures in the Civil Rights Movement, the work is a lively mix of voices, movement images, and narration, backed by an evocative musical score.
Add a Residency With Your Presentation of No Strangers Here Today and The Hillsboro Story,.
A teaching residency expands the ideas inside the performance work academically and creatively. The interdisciplinary approach encourages students to dialogue, imagine, conceptualize, and integrate their personal history and intuitive process with current art/academic goals. Classes and workshops can be discipline-specific and/or interdisciplinary and collaborative. We work with you to design an original, relevant workshop and residency.
For example, a residency can be an open rehearsal, lecture and dialogue, week-long residence, single workshops. The content of a residency may be an interaction conversations related to research into art, traveling to memory places, history of Underground Railroad and school desegregation, re-claiming family history and ancestral lineage, the rehearsal process and collaborative practice.
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