Richmond Leader

MK Abadoo builds community through dance

With their “Hoptown” immersive performance, MK Abadoo, a dance professor and iCubed scholar, uses sistering circles to create intergenerational connections.

Beautiful art sometimes originates in dark places. For MK Abadoo, Virginia Commonwealth University dance professor and iCubed scholar in the Racial Equity, Arts and Culture core, the passion project that has consumed much of their time and energy over the past several years started during a rough time.

“The seed was planted around 2017 into 2018,” Abadoo said. “It was a major transition in my life and my mother was visiting me quite often. We would sit together after my daughter would go to sleep and, inevitably, it would lead to her telling me stories about her life, stories I had never heard before.”

These stories prompted Abadoo to look more closely into a town important to her growing up, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the site of many family reunions and where her grandmother lived. In a fortuitous coincidence, she discovered that the author bell hooks, whose work they were rediscovering, grew up in Hopkinsville. “In her writing, she talks about growing up in Kentucky and developing a deep love of the land, of Appalachia, but she didn’t talk about Hopkinsville specifically,” Abadoo said.

The convergence of these factors inspired Abadoo to create “Hoptown,” an immersive, evening-long work that enlists audience members as “witnesses” to the experience as the action of the dance happens around and in-between them. Abadoo is developing the work through rehearsals in Richmond, three residencies in Hopkinsville and one just completed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She hopes to bring the work to VCU later this year.

Even as Abadoo continues to develop the work along with a company of core performers, the groundbreaking project has already been honored and awarded, starting with a National Performance Network Creation Fund award in 2021, receiving a National Dance Project Production Grant last October and most recently garnering support from the Kennedy Center through its Office Hours residency program.

Original source can be found here