Event

Dream Feed

The Theatre and Dance Department is excited to welcome HawtPlates to Dickinson College as part of a 6 week spring artist residency. The HawtPlates are a family singing group, made up of Justin Hicks, Jade Hicks, and Kenita Miller-Hicks, that was formed in a one-bedroom apartment in The South Bronx. While living together, they found ways of addressing many of the issues unfolding around us in the neighborhood, in the city, in the world, and in our work lives. All three have worked in music, theater, and art but mostly take refuge in the sound of each others voices in perpetual jibe and in the synch of bodies in proximity as they play.

As part of their residency, HawtPlates will work with students on a new devised piece entitled "Dream Feed" which will serve as the spring MainStage theatrical production. Dream Feed is an electro-acoustic work that drops The HawtPlates and the audience into an extended dream sequence - steeping us in the humor, terror, beauty, and allure of the active mind within a slumbering body. Using found sound, electronics and vocals the work will hover in a state of innovatory sounding and motion. Along with creative producer/choreographer Jennifer Newman, and dramaturg Sunder Ganglani, The HawtPlates will devise a kinetic vocal performance that resides in the portal between question and answer. This work does not aim to answer questions, so much as it aims to live in the journey of a dream as a radical state of solving, taking cues from dream sequences from avant-garde cinema and the afro-surrealist works of artists like Aaron Gilbert, Cauleen Smith, Charles White, and Bob Kaufman.