Palladium Nights: Work-in-Progress Showing with Sekou McMiller & Friends
Palladium Nights: Work–in–Progress Showing with Sekou McMiller & Friends
DATE & TIME: Wednesday, December 9, 7-8PM
FREE Community Program. Registration encouraged.
Join BAC Artists-in-Residence Sekou McMiller & Friends for a Work-in-Progress Showing of their newest work Palladium Nights.
Palladium Nights explores the cultural legacy and artistic impact of New York’s historic Palladium Ballroom (1940s–60s), a vibrant site of exchange where Afro-Latin and African American communities helped shape what we now recognize as Salsa/Mambo dance.
The dancers will share excerpts from the piece they are working on while in Residence at BAC, testing out certain moments with audience feedback. Audience will be invited to dance! Come ready to move and enjoy yourself. This high energy, intergenerational showing is for all ages.
ABOUT Palladium Nights
Palladium Nights, a new evening-length work that explores the cultural legacy and artistic impact of New York’s historic Palladium Ballroom (1940s–60s), a vibrant site of exchange where Afro-Latin and African American communities helped shape what we now recognize as Salsa/Mambo dance. More than a nightclub, the Palladium was an incubator of innovation, identity and social movement. This work honors that history while engaging its ongoing influence on today, dance and culture.
The choreography will be rooted in Afro-Latin social dance forms, such as mambo, cha-cha-chá and pachanga, but, will not aim to replicate the past. Instead, Palladium Nights will investigate how core values from the Palladium era: musicality, improvisation, individuality within community continue to inform movement today. A central choreographic theme will be the concept of “Shines” a moment of improvised solo expression within partner dance, reimagined as a metaphor for cultural resilience and individual voice.
Palladium Nights was created, in part, with the support of a Works & Process residency at Bethany Arts Community.
ABOUT SEKOU MCMILLER
Originally from Chicago, Sekou boasts a unique and diverse background as a former Chief Financial Officer, accountant and professional classical flutist as well as an emerging Latin dance artist. Pioneering as a performer, choreographer and instructor at the forefront of a new movement in Afro Latin dance, Sekou’s unique fusion style has a strong Afro-Caribbean essence that is laced with many different dance techniques combined with an explosive energy. His choreographic and performance career have garnered him broad recognition worldwide.
Sekou’s diverse career ranges from performing off-Broadway to performing and choreographing for top Latin artists. He performed in both Celia: The Musical and Afro-Tango and choreographed for networks such as Bravo TV, NUVO TV and Good Morning America. Some of the Latin artists he has worked with include Gilberto Santa Rosa, Willie Colon, Ismael Miranda, Cheo Feliciano, Johnny Pacheco, Tito Rojas, Tito Nieves, PitBull, as well as the pop icon Madonna. Sekou was also featured in the documentary “Uprooted: the journey of Jazz Dance” (2020) and the upcoming Warner Bros theatrical feature “In the Heights” (2021). Sekou has worked with the Radio City Rockettes and was invited to choreograph for the Alvin Ailey School and Joffrey Ballet School. One of his many special projects include performing and choreographing for the United Nations Unveiling of the Monument the Ark of Return: honoring the victims of Slavery and lives lost during transit of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
Sekou was awarded the following choreographic residencies: The Alvin Ailey Foundation’s New Directions Choreography Lab for Winter/Spring (2017) hosted by Robert Battle and The Ailey School and the City University of New York Dance Initiative Residency at Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture at Hostos Community College (2017). Both residencies served in the development of a piece entitled “I’m-Pulse: an Afro Latin Jazz and Soul Experience”. This work was set to explore the rich history of collaborations between the African- American and Afro Latin Caribbean cultures and how together these helped to shape and forever change the landscape of American dance and music.
Sekou has performed, choreographed and instructed in over 30 countries and over 150 cities worldwide. His works have been featured at Dance Chicago, New York Jazz Choreographers Festival, The Actors Fund Theater, APAP New York City Center, Peridance Salvatore Capezio Theater, Ailey CitiGroup Theater, Symphony Space, Guggenheim Museum, Jacob’s Pillow, Edison Ballroom, United Palace Theater, the United Nations General assembly, Olympic Park Stadium in Seoul, S. Korea, the Great Wall of China, Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto, Habour Dance Vancouver and Winter Gardens in Blackpool, U.K.
He now resides in New York City where he is the artistic director/choreographer of Sekou McMiller and Friends. He continues to remain a faculty member at The Ailey School, Joffrey Ballet School: Jazz and Contemporary, Peridance Capezio Center, Broadway Dance Center, Ballet Hispanico and Intensive Guest Instructor at Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Earl Mosley’s Hearts of Men, Joffrey West, Joffrey Miami and the Ailey Experience.
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This event is an Artist Residency Community Program. As part of a residency at BAC, we ask each artist to build and facilitate a Community Program. Community Programs are a unique opportunity for both artists-in-residence and our local community to gather, engage, and be in conversation with one another through art. Community Programs are free engagements open to the public and/or in collaboration with a local community partner.
This Residency and Community Program are made possible through BAC’s partnership with Works & Process at the Guggenheim. BAC is proud to partner with Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim to support creators of the performing arts and incubate new works. As two organizations committed to supporting artists across disciplines and in various stages of their artistic process, the partnership is a natural fit.
