HCL Commission

Included as a part of Chicago Takes 10 | Supported by the Walder Foundation

Two, too (CTT cut)

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. Scheduled to premiere winter 2022, Two, too is inspired by the social mixing of people who populated Chicago’s Black social dance night clubs from the 1920’s to the 1960’s and asks what it means since then to forge and sustain friendships between Black and white women in 2021. Conceived and directed by Monroe, the dance piece asks “How can you literally work things out on the dance floor? Two, too captures all of it. It allows me/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.”

About the artists

Raquel Monroe (PhD, UCLA) is an interdisciplinary performance scholar and artist whose research interests include black social dance, black feminisms, and popular culture. Her scholarship appears in journals and anthologies on race, sexuality, dance and popular culture. She is completing a monograph analyzing the intersections of Black feminism and Black liberation by Black female cultural producers in popular culture and the Black public sphere. Monroe is a core member of the artist collective Propelled Animals. She is the Co Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and an Associate Professor in Dance at Columbia College Chicago. She is a founding board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance.

Esther Baker-Tarpaga (MA and MFA, UCLA) is a choreographer, performance artist, and co-founder of Propelled Animals and Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project. She is interested in how art is a tool for transformation and a path to engage anti-racism and climate justice actions. She recently performed at Trade School Philadelphia, The Chicago Architecture Biennale, ArtYard New Jersey, No New Idols Festival in Riga, Lativa, The Englert Theatre Iowa City, and BAAD Bronx. She was an Artist in Residence at Marin Headlands, MAP Fund awardee, FCA Grantee, Grant Wood Fellow, and Cultural Envoy in Guinea, Botswana, and South Africa. She teaches part-time at Temple University.

About Propelled Animals

Propelled Animals organized as a collective in 2014 and in addition to Monroe and Baker-Tarpaga include  Barber (multidisciplinary artist, Chicago/Detroit), Boubacar Djiga (composer/musician, Burkina Faso), Heidi Wiren Bartlett (performance artist/designer, Pittsburg). They create site-specific work to facilitate conversations around anti-racism, gender inclusivity, and environmental justice. Their process encourages audiences and collaborators alike to consider the efficacy of the body, resilience, protest, and radical  tenderness as strategies against institutional racism.