Congratulations to TDPS alum Kwame Shaka Opare on BAM Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship

Congratulations to MFA Dance alum Kwame Shaka Opare on being awarded the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship this past weekend at DanceAfrica 2016!

Congratulations to MFA Dance alum Kwame Shaka Opare on being awarded the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship this past weekend at DanceAfrica 2016! The $9,000 Fellowship will enable Kwame to further his study of West African dance in Ghana.

Kwame is a DC native who also claims Brooklyn as home. He began training in West African dance as a teenager at the Kankouran West African Dance Company and he founded the DishiBem Traditional Contemporary Dance Group in 2003 to bridge the gap between traditional West African and contemporary performance modes. His choreography often deals with global social issues, and his work has won him a variety of awards, including a Katherine Dunham Award for Best New Choreography for "Suite Nina" which he choreographed, with Diedre Dawkins, for Muntu Dance Theater Chicago. He received his MFA in Dance from the UMD School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies in 2013.

With the BAM Fellowship, Kwame will travel to Ghana to build on relationships with the National Ballet. He will collaborate with other Ghanaian artists and create new work that explores West African dance technique and aesthetics on the contemporary stage.

Kwame Opare receives the Emerging Choreographer Fellowship from Chuck Davis (left)

Kwame Opare with Bouly Sonko, director of the National Ballet of Senegal (right)

About the Chuck Davis Emerging Choreographer Fellowship

Established with support of the SHS Foundation in 2015, the fellowship honors Chuck Davis’ contribution to DanceAfrica, the annual festival that he founded in 1977 and for which he served as artistic director until 2015. The fellowship offers up to $9,000 annually for one emerging choreographer to travel to Africa or its diaspora and study with experts in the field of African dance. It is the first fellowship created by BAM. In its inaugural year it received more than 50 applications.

For more information about the fellowship, visit: http://www.bam.org/media/6401474/Chuck-Fellowship_2016-Final.pdf

Photographs provided by Kwame Shaka Opare