“Black on Earth” interactive MFA performance combines dance, agriculture, technology and more

Rosel Burt
Fri, 16 Feb 2024 03:51:59 +0000
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“Black on Earth,” an interdisciplinary dance performance that highlights the experiences of Black farmers and will take place Friday and Saturday, was a collaborative project between newly married Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine (left) and Orland Hunter-Valentine (right). Credit: Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine

An upcoming interdisciplinary performance by Ohio State Master of Fine Arts students, titled “Black on Earth,” will combine dance, agriculture and technology to explore Black farmers’ life experiences.

The project is a collaboration between newly married couple Orlando Hunter-Valentine and Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine, who are both third-years in Ohio State’s Master of Fine Arts dance program. The performance — which will take place Friday and Saturday from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Sullivant Hall —? follows the connection between movement and agriculture the pair has recognized from their own time spent in New York City, they said.

“Thinking about the ways that Black people have created resilience and sustained ourselves through farming and agricultural practices, that’s been the core theme of this work,” Orlando Hunter-Valentine said.

Orlando Hunter-Valentine — who graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s of fine arts in dance — and Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine — who graduated from Marlboro College with a bachelor’s of arts in international studies and a concentration in dance and photography — were asked to bring their work to Ohio State by professor of dance Nadine George-Graves. Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine said George-Graves was drawn to the way the pair merged artistic and scholarly works.

“We are researchers, and we are artistic in our display of what we come to understand about the research,” Orlando Hunter-Valentine said. “I think OSU specifically is great because we were fully funded to come here to the agricultural department, and the agricultural energy here is not like New York.”

To enhance the performance’s atmospheric quality, Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine said the duo partnered with Jessica Rajko — an audio designer from Wayne State University — to create a haptic soundscape. This means all action will be underscored by a technologically rendered selection of immersive background noises, he said.

Beyond sounds, Orlando Hunter-Valentine said the performance’s interdisciplinary nature means it will incorporate additional mediums like agriculture, photography, sculpturing and even cooking.

“Within African diasporic movement, there’s really not this separating out of these different things,” Orlando Hunter-Valentine said. “The dance coincides with the food, coincides with the storytelling, coincides with the singing, coincides with the theater of it all. I think we would have done ourselves a disservice if we worked in a singular way.”

When it comes to visuals, Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine captured every photo displayed in the show. Despite his undergraduate photography experience, Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine said it was not until the performance’s creation in 2021 that photography became a defining art form for him.?

“We wanted to make sure that folks can enter the work in different ways, and I use the camera as a tool to archive our process and to really share the images of what it means to be a Black, same gender-loving farmer who happens to dance as well, and also show who the faces are in the community doing that growing too,” Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine said.

Additionally, Orlando Hunter-Valentine is preparing to serve his “Fierce Love Fried Corn” recipe to attendees before performances begin. He said a digitally led “Ekonkon” dance, which originates from the Jola people of Senegal and is associated with harvest time, will also enhance the event’s interactivity.

“Being in the United States where we’re in food-insecure spaces, how are we supposed to know how to grow our food if that’s something that we never experienced before?” Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine said. “For us as dancers, we were like, ‘There are dances that are absolutely connected to agriculture that can help our communities figure out how to grow their own food and build a different relationship with the land versus this kind of traumatic experience that we’ve had through slavery and sharecropping and redlining, etc.”

Following Saturday’s show, there will be a Q&A session with Department of Agriculture associate professor Mary Rodriguez, Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine said.

All performances of “Black on Earth” will take place at the Barnett Theatre in Sullivant Hall. Tickets for the performances cost $5 and can be purchased in person through the Ohio State Theatre Ticket Office or via Ticketmaster.

Note: This story was updated Monday, Feb. 26 at 4:14 p.m. to properly attribute the “Fierce Love Fried Corn” recipe to Orlando-Hunter Valentine, not Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine.