Emory Dance Company Choreographer Julio Medina

Photo from Medina's Fall 2019 EDC piece form & fragment

By Raven Crosby, Emory Dance Program Office Assistant

This fall, Emory Dance faculty member Julio Medina is creating a dance film with dancers in the Emory Dance Company that addresses the issue of racism in our country. As a starting point, he analyzed poetry that looks at racism, by poets such as Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, and Jericho Brown, who is an Emory faculty member in the Creative Writing Program. 

Medina decided to create a dance film since the pandemic does not allow for a live audience. In the film, Medina wants to convey a sense of connection and community between his dancers without physical touch and with distance. Medina stated, “This is going to be the most difficult, especially with a topic like racism, where a way to combat this is by showing bodies that can support each other, respect each other, and take care of each other. How do you do that when you can’t touch or hug or hold a hand? That will be a creative limit to explore in this piece."

 

During rehearsals, Medina encourages his dancers to create their own solos, duets, and trios from prompts that he provides through their exploration process. Medina believes that there should be a balance between the choreography that he teaches and allowing the dancers to share their own creative input; he wants to develop a very open and collaborative space to create. Dancers gain inspiration and challenge their ideas through free writing, poetry reading, and sharing, which effectively leads them to create movement. In addition to creating movement, Medina must also decide how to frame the bodies in shots, how to manage the lighting, and how to choose locations to create context for the choreography.

The main takeaway that Medina would like for his dancers to obtain from this process is that “dance-making and art-making can be a healing process and that we can have fun while doing this.” Medina is not quantifying the success of his film through views or going viral; instead he wants to reflect on the process of exploring such a difficult and complex topic like racism in a productive way. He hopes to inspire his dancers to make their own art or to make sense of the things that happen in this world.