INTERVIEW: This dance company has lots of ‘AbunDance’
The Brooklyn-based AbunDance Academy of the Arts is ready to dream this weekend. The celebrated institution for all things performing arts will offer its annual showcase Sunday, June 24 at Brooklyn’s historic Kings Theatre. Audience members — no doubt many of them proud parents — will be able to view the academy’s many talents, all centered on the theme of “dreaming” and the movie Dreamgirls.
Dream, AbunDantly! tells the story of four African-American girls who follow their dreams to become top performers. Along the way, they bring a spotlight to the historic struggle against racism. As a press release states, the performance is a “celebration of black women reaching across generations to achieve their dreams.”
Expect to hear such tunes as “Listen,” “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,” “Mess Around” and “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” among others.
“I wrote the script to pay tribute to the four little girls that were bombed in the Birmingham, Alabama, bombing of 1963, and so it really starts with that gut-wrenching passion behind the story,” said Karisma Jay, founder and artistic director of AbunDance. “There’s a lot of glitz and glam, and there are a lot of songs that we love and know from the Dreamgirls soundtrack. And those are being performed but in a different way, so there’s a lot of versatility but also a lot of relevance, too — some of the emotions that I know we’re all feeling today with the current political climate and the energy that’s in the air.”
Jay and her team of instructors start working on the annual showcase many months in advance, and she feels confident that the performers are ready.
“Yesterday we finalized the last half of the show, and the band came yesterday,” she said last week. “So, you know, now it’s just a matter of doing it over and over again until we get it from top to bottom. The blessing though is that we really start to prepare our cast well in advance so that this is not something that is out of their comfort zone.”
It’s rare for a Brooklyn-based arts organization to rent out Kings Theatre, a large and historic theater that normally plays host to mainstream concert acts like David Byrne, Death Cab for Cutie and Tenacious D. Their spot on the calendar speaks to AbunDance’s success and influence in the borough.
“We were the ones that entered the space and kind of shook up the space with all of this energy,” Jay said. “A lot of performances that were happening in Kings Theatre were mainstage celebrity performances that were not really conducive to what all Brooklyn represents, and so to have a Brooklyn cast, to have it be a Brooklyn organization with Brooklyn volunteers and Brooklyn staff, even Brooklyn technicians and backstage people, it’s really, really special.”
Although Jay founded AbunDance, she likes to say that the academy actually founded her. The name means a lot to her because she was “willing abundance” into her life, and she saw a logical connection to starting an arts academy and using that important word as the namesake.
“It was supposed to attract all of the positive abundance of good that I could, and so now all that we received and all that we continue to receive is no surprise because that’s inherent in what AbunDance is all about,” she said. “It started out with my mom who was a dancer and somewhat of a performer, and me going to dance classes with her when I was little, little, little. And then it just manifested into always wanting to be on stage, always loving to share my heart and being that little girl in the center of the floor at anybody’s wedding, dancing, or at any given Sunday creating some kind of make-believe show to perform for my mom. So now it’s turned into this.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
AbunDance Academy of the Arts will present Dream, Abundantly Sunday, June 24 at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Click here for more information and tickets.
