Red Clay Dance Company lives to awaken “glocal” Artivism through creating, performing and teaching dances of the African Diaspora.
Named in 2021 as one of Chicago’s Cultural Treasures! Our Artivism not only transforms cultural and socio-economic inequities in our “glocal” community, but it also shares stories we know to be true about who we are as a people. Through this work, we amplify voices of the African Diaspora, seek remuneration equity for artists, support Black women and create accessible excellence.
We are a welcoming home for professional and pre-professional dancers, dance-lovers, and other artists to convene, create, and collaborate together. The professional Touring Company of Artivists creates and performs thought-provoking, uplifting, challenging, socially-conscious Afro-Contemporary dance for audiences around the world. In addition, Red Clay School of Dance and Red Clay Dance Youth Ensemble offer world-class training to youth, teens and adults as a pipeline toward professional careers in the arts.
Our Community, Engagement, Education, Partnerships (CEEP) program provides accessible excellence in dance education to schools and community groups, and serves more than five hundred students throughout Chicago. Our innovative Making the Artivist program creates courageous spaces that empower local youth to share their stories and lift their voices while learning to lead impactful social change. With the opening of our Center for Excellence in Woodlawn, our In the Making membership program provides affordable creative space and a supportive infrastructure for dancers and choreographers in Chicago.
As a Black, female-led, for-purpose organization, Red Clay Dance Company strives to:
Amplify Voices of the African Diaspora
Red Clay Dance Company is Chicago’s premier professional Afro-contemporary dance company, touring nationally and internationally to share our stories and our Artivism. The Red Clay School of Dance and our Red Clay Dance Youth Ensemble serve as a pipeline for youth in our communities to become thriving professional artists by providing courageous spaces of liberation and inspiration. Our Community Engagement, Education, and Partnerships (CEEP) program creates change that transforms systemic cultural and socio-economic imbalances by providing our village with knowledge and tools to effect change.
Seek Remuneration Equity for Artists
Red Clay Dance is a powerful advocate for artists, especially artists of the Black/African Diaspora, to achieve appropriate financial benefit from the movement practices they create. We provide equitable compensation and benefits to our artists and staff through sustainable operations and capacity building. Further, the performance of our professional work employs and fairly compensates professional dancers, other artists, and production trades while patronizing local vendors in our community.
Support Black Women
Red Clay Dance Company strengthens the Black community by deepening our support of Black women and girls. Black women create, teach, nurture, and protect our communities. Their strength and enrichment is intrinsically linked to the uplifting of the Black/African Diaspora. Red Clay Dance Company is committed to ensuring that all Black/African Diaspora female dance professionals thrive in the global arts marketplace by cultivating and empowering our sisters through our performances, training, education, and community programs.
Create Accessible Excellence
Red Clay Dance Company’s education programs exist to ensure that all communities have barrier-free access to high quality, comprehensive dance training and artistic mentorship in African Diasporic dance. Our classes provide open and accessible spaces that are less restrictive on movement and allow students to more easily study, create, and perform diverse dance forms in more depth than class offerings generally found in schools and degree programs. Further, our programs actively combat systemic issues of White supremacy in dance education by creating, performing, and teaching excellence in Black dance, positioning our artistry as unequivocally equal to other dance forms.
© Michelle Reid
THE HERSTORY
Founded in Brooklyn, NY in July 2008 and now based in Chicago, IL, Red Clay Dance Company is the brainchild of Vershawn Sanders-Ward, the institutions’ Founding Artistic Director & CEO. Red Clay Dance is Chicago’s premier Afro-contemporary dance company, voted Best Dance Organization by the Chicago Reader in 2019. The touring company is a versatile and dynamic ensemble of dance artivist that tours and performs locally, nationally and internationally the choreographic work of its founder. The organization also houses its own School of Dance, Youth Ensemble and provides dance education programming to schools and community partners.
Envisioned during her first trip to Africa in the summer of 2007, Sanders-Ward had just finished grad school at New York University and was spending her summer traveling, performing, and preparing for the next step in her artistic journey. It was at L’Ecole De Sables, a dance school in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal founded by legendary choreographer Germaine Acogny that Sanders-Ward first witnessed the spiritual interconnectedness of dance and daily life. At that moment, she decided this “embodied knowing” had to be the foundation for her dance company. She recognized the impact of Acogny’s gift to that small fishing village- a dance school that brought economic development and entrepreneurial opportunities to it’s neighbors. Sanders-Ward desired to build an organization that would have this same impact in marginalized communities on the South Side of Chicago. Red Clay Dance Company is rooted in African Diaspora movement practices and serves as a platform for Artivism (art + activism). It creates dance work that aspires to have a “glocal” impact and help to erase the cultural and socio-economic inequities in our city, nation, and world. Upon founding the company, she quickly began to gather like-minded dance artists who might help her actualize her dream. The name Red Clay Dance comes from her childhood memories. Although raised in the Chicago area, she was born in Mobile, Alabama, where she spent every summer, until the age of 12, with her grandparents learning about the land and the history of her birthplace of Plateau, also known as “Africatown”. This small community was formed by a group of 32 West Africans from the Kindgom of Dahomey, who in 1860, were included in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States on a slave ship called Clotilda.
“Thinking back, the red earth was a playground for me as a kid, and I would use it to make all sorts of crazy things,” recalls Sanders-Ward. “Mix it with a little water, and it was like clay, something I could take with my hands and mold into something spectacular! It was unique because I made it, I dreamt it and designed it with my own hands.”
This is how Sanders-Ward views her choreographic work, a shaping and molding of our shared humanity expressed through dance, creating a visceral experience that lays bare our embodied memories. She choreographed her first work, Red Clay Child to honor this family history. Red Clay Dance Company is a thriving 501c3 charitable organization that houses a professional touring company, a world-class school of dance, a pre-professional youth ensemble, and a robust Community Engagement, Education and Partnership (CEEP) program that offers culturally rich dance education and artivism training to schools and community spaces.