Culminating an ambitious HCL Residency at Experimental Station, Dorothée Munyaneza and Keyierra Collins perform a work in development prior to its 2020 premiere in Charleroi Danse Biennale. Dorothée employs music, text and movement and creates community by dealing with rupture as a dynamic force. Her HCL Residency has spanned eleven weeks and is designed as an intercontinental, inter-city and multigenerational journey. It has provided Dorothée creative studio time at Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest) and at Experimental Station (in Woodlawn/Hyde Park-Kenwood, Chicago) to develop a first draft with Keyierra Collins (dance) and Ben LaMar Gay (music). The HCL Residency has also supported a series of artistic exchanges with avery r young (music, poetry); Norman Teague and Folayemi Wilson (visual art), Raquel Monroe (dance), and others.
Accompanying Dorothée in her HCL Residency at Experimental Station is Nicolas Détrie, an Ashoka Fellow and director of Yes We Camp in Marseille, and their young children. Sharing Experimental Station’s principles of independent sustainability and mutualism, his Yes We Camp organization builds citizenry by deploying previously vacant lots or buildings where social groups can mix and be self-empowered.
HCL is pushing the possibility of the Residency program by building on their combined artistic and social practice and the numerous people engaged through this unique city to city partnership and exchange. HCL has supported a series of meals, presentations and workshops co-organized by Dorothée and Nicolas with youth of Blackstone Bike Works and the School at Invisible Institute, educators, and community organizers through the efforts of Experimental Station, lead partner, and the Egan Office Urban Education and Community Partnerships at DePaul University, and Stein Learning Gardens at Saint Sabina.