VICTORIA LYNN AWKWARD
Boston, MA
Founder and Director, VLA Dance
Choreographer: Encantados
Biography
Victoria Lynn Awkward is a multi-hyphenate creator, administrator, educator and the Director of VLA DANCE. She pursued her multiple interests at Goucher College and graduated with high honors in Dance, Visual Art and Secondary Education. As the Director of VLA DANCE she is researching how to lead with joy, pleasure, and breath in and outside of art making practices. This work is guided through the lineage of Black and queer liberation practitioners. Under VLA DANCE she is currently creating, For Nina and In The Space Between. Alongside directing VLA DANCE, Victoria is a freelance artist, who most recently choreographed for Huntington Theater, Company One Theatre, Boston Lyric Opera, and Commonwealth Shakespeare. Victoria is also an educator having worked at Salem State University, Brown University, West End House, Middlesex School, and Urbanity Dance. She continues to deepen her teaching practices as a mentee with Midday Movement Series. Victoria is currently a Brother Thomas Fellow, and recipient of the Next Steps for Boston Grant Dance Program as well as a recipient of the Queer (Re)public Theater Offensive Residency. Through her work she aims to inspire people to pause and reflect on their actions towards themselves, their community and their environment.
Interview
What's important to you in a creative process?
The rapidly changing environments of dance practice propel me into heightened awareness of my physical body, other dancing bodies, and navigating shared space. Honing this three-dimensional awareness empowers my ability to engage with ephemeral and unexpected transformation. In addition to grounding me in a multilayered reality dance also calls me to imagine new possibilities. This has strengthened my practice of dreaming - visualizing what could be possible in our world systematically and culturally. Finding my way through the messiness of humanity, I aim to create pervasive and positive change in my communities of influence. I’m excited to consider: if we burn down the inequitable systems we encounter now, what do we build instead? While I believe in the impact of dance, I’m also careful to analyze concert dance practices that uphold oppressive structures. Without this critical lens it’s far too easy to reenact damaging structures through a vulnerable art form. Contemporary dance has a layered lineage, one that is often tied to aesthetics that highlight harm. I push back against these norms and remind contemporary dancers of the aesthetics that encourage care of body/mind/community, diversity as key to a healthy community, resource abundance, and individuality that can support the collective. I am inspired by the Black and queer artists who have come before me and utilized performing arts as a tool for liberation. I seek dynamics, rigor and emotionally informed movement. I pull from Modern and Contemporary dance with diasporic influences, such as jazz, and often work in tandem with musicians and theater artists. It is important to me that my family and community, professional artists and non professionals, can recognize themselves within my work and experience familiarity even within its abstraction.
What was your "entry point" or inspiration for this piece?
The music was a large inspiration for this piece. Training the dancers in both contemporary practice and improvisation styles became important to deepen the jazz aesthetics within this work. A score the dancers engaged with which I learned from choreographer, Jasmine Hearn, is a "listening score." This improvisation task asks the dancers to dance with/against the different instruments, phrasings, and melodies within a song. It trained us to be attentive to both the subtle and prominent musicality within the performance music. Developing our listening abilities also attunes us to how each dancer wants to engage with their own body, with the others on stage and the space they are performing within - a skill very much woven into jazz performance aesthetics.
From inside the piece: How would you describe dancing Victoria's work?
Encantados is a high energy, vivacious experience from start to finish, ranging between relaxed and punchy movement that transports the full company. An expression of joy and vigor, this work grows and blossoms like a living being — we build energy between each other to finally breathe and melt away as Josiah culminates our collective experience into a final exhale.