Dance about immigration

Left to right, performers Jennie Cockrell, Kala Hildebrand, Jaime Scott, Robin Scott and Karen George are part of "Travelogue: Stories of our Migration,” produced by the Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre and White Dog ProjectX International. (Photo by Susan Collard/Special to the Citizen-Time)

He was 8 when he experienced his first big move. In 1968, he was plucked out of his home in a Cambodian village by French government officials and sent to live in France.

Raymond's father was French and his mother was Vietnamese, and because of his nationality, he was one of about 40 children from his village with French nationality who were moved to France.

“It's a journey from between birthday and death day,” he said. “This is why I became interested in moving … moving means that we have to accept change and accept where we are now, where we were before the movement and who we were during the change.”

Raymond contributed “Nomad,” a piece about his ancestry and immigration, to “Travelogue: Stories of our Migration,” produced by the Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre and White Dog ProjectX International. The dance concert will be at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at The Diana Wortham Theatre.

After the theater company premieres the work at Diana Wortham, it will be performed at the international Oc-Ohtic modern dance festival in Merida, Yucatan.

“Immigration, we feel, is a challenging subject right now because of all the limitations involved,” said ACDT director Susan Collard, who helped choreograph the show. “Art has always been the voice for politics and the discussion for issues in the world that are sometimes too difficult to discuss verbally.”

“Travelogue” will feature a variety of immigration narratives, all of which were inspired by the choreographers' and dancers' backgrounds. There are pieces about Jewish immigrants escaping the Holocaust and a story of a woman leaving behind her family and fiancé to come to America.

“I hope that people will start to think about our own immigration story,” Collard said. “I'm hoping that other people will get interested in the positive side of immigration … I think we need to think carefully about the past and how beneficial it is.”

Nelson Reyes, who came to Asheville from his native Cuba, produced a piece with fellow Cuban dancer Diana Cabrera Stepanova.

“The hardest part for us when we immigrated was how we are going to integrate into a new culture,” he said.

Ultimately, he aimed to explore the complexity of the immigration experience, examining the loss and opportunity, the sadness and the humor of this human experience, he said.

“That's the reality of immigrants,” he said.

Source:citizen-times.com