Propelled Animals
Raquel Monroe and Esther Baker-Tarpaga perform a working draft of Two, too, a continued exploration of their interdisciplinary dance work with the artists collective Propelled Animals.
Watch the Performance
Raquel Monroe
Raquel Monroe (Ph.D., UCLA) is a performance scholar and artist. Research interest and journal/anthology publishing include race, sexuality, dance and popular culture. She is completing a monograph analyzing intersections of Black feminism and liberation by Black female cultural producers in popular culture and the Black public sphere. She is Co-Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and Associate Professor at Columbia College, and a founding board member of Collegium for African Diaspora Dance.
Esther Baker-Tarpaga
Esther Baker-Tarpaga (MA/MFA, UCLA) is a choreographer-performer, co-founder of Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project. Interests include art as a tool for transformation and to engage anti-racism and climate justice actions. She has performed at Trade School Philadelphia, Chicago Architecture Biennale, ArtYard New Jersey, No New Idols Festival Riga, BAAD Bronx; Residency at Marin Headlands, Grant Wood Fellow, Cultural Envoy in Guinea, Botswana and South Africa. She teaches at Temple University.
Above images of the artists by Maeve Jackson
About the Performance
Raquel Monroe and Esther Baker-Tarpaga perform a working draft of Two, too, a continued exploration of their interdisciplinary dance work with the artists collective Propelled Animals. They draw on composed and improvised movement in Two, too to ask what it means to forge and sustain friendships between Black and white women in 2021. How can you literally work things out on the dance floor? Two, too captures all of it.
“It allows us the opportunity to travel to the past, be in the present, and project into the future. It allows us to travel through time to honor the past and envision collective futures. 9 minutes 29 seconds. The time we danced. To remember George Floyd's death.”--(Monroe and Baker-Tarpaga)
