The Return To Innocence Lost

Overview

The Return to Innocence Lost explores themes around generational trauma, conception, death, and rebirth. The work explores the complexities of navigating black livelihood in a society that demands their strength while simultaneously challenging their existence; A secret shared, a silence broken. A secret we share but hide within our walls, between sheets, and between mystique whispers the story is held. How do we return to our innocence?

About the Artist

Dance is to remember, to celebrate, to come together, find unity, and community.

Deziah Neasia was born in Syracuse, the ancestral lands of Onondaga Nation, where the winter draws you in close, a long embrace, broken by the spring showers. It enriches the land, allowing for summer to bloom. Dance has connected Deziah to many black mentors that helped influence her movement languaging as well as nurture her artistic blossoming. Deziahs work uses play within movement and sound in order to question how play can be related to how we view cycles of trauma in black communities and see it as an entry point to demonstrate ways of functioning within a society working against black bodies.

We are constantly playing within the state of flux. Feet pounding, jumping, soaring across pavement, green fields, church grounds, and rooted in the grounds we find our way back to ourselves. Dreaming a world where black bodies are liberated! Free to move, be still, imagining a world that serves as the anchor for mapping home.

Credits