Performance by Scapegoat Garden at Center for the Arts Influences Student Capstone Project
(Andrew Chatfield for Wesleyan Connection, July 10, 2024)
Ways of Knowing: Centering Art in Liberal Arts Education (Joshua Lubin-Levy for Wesleyan University Magazine, July 9, 2024)
A Response and a Call: Joining Hands for Justice
(Justice Dance Performance Project, August 8, 2023)
“A Response and a Call,” JDPP’s performance series for artists of color to share space and how they navigate through the complicated journey of live in America, took place in person for the first time in August 2023. In this edition, host Mellissa Craig and panelists Andre Rochester, Deb Goffe, and JDPP founder Judy Dworin gathered with a live audience at Free Center Hartford for conversation and inspiration surrounding race, freedom, and celebrating Black joy in our community.
News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in July 2023
(Courtney Escoyne for Dance Magazine, August 1, 2023)
Scapegoat Garden’s ‘Liturgy/Order/Bridge’ performance piece in Hartford pushes ideas of faith, nature and fashion
(Chris Arnott for the Hartford Courant, July 11, 2023)
Inside the Pillow Lab
(Jacob’s Pillow, January 9, 2023)
Inside the Pillow Lab is an intimate new film series that captures works in process and behind-the-scenes moments of what it’s like for artists to live, work, and rehearse together again in COVID-compliant residencies on the Pillow’s retreat-like campus. During this Pillow Lab Residency, Goffe developed “Liturgy|Order|Bridge”, a work inspired by communal embodiment in the Black church and the absurdity of Fellini’s ecclesiastical fashion show. These serve as points of reference to correlate religious ritual with theatrical devices that can make the membrane between performance and audience more porous. Centering dance as the organizing principle in a ritualized public ceremony, the work asks: What might it mean to engage dance practice as faith practice, performance as communal ceremony, performance space as consecrated site, and the fellowship of shared witness, place, and inheritance? “Liturgy|Order|Bridge” activates our intersecting identities, senses of place, and commitments to support one another. Goffe will be joined in this endeavor by her core collaborators Lauren Horn, Arien Wilkerson and Abena Koomson-Davis.
A Response and a Call Freedom Journeys: She Takes Flight Through Story
(Justice Dance Performance Project, November 11, 2022)
JDPP’s A Response and Call series has explored a wide range of topics around race, equity, social justice since 2020. The goal for the signature web series has remained the same: to share space with artists of color to explore and navigate the complicated journey of life in America, as told through dance, song and spoken word. On Friday, November 11, JDPP host and curator, Mellissa Craig, facilitated a conversation with guests Deborah Goffe and Lauren Horn. The collective stories featured in this episode embodied the true spirit of identity, ownership of one’s narrative, the opportunity to make space for each other, and ultimately, the expansive flights to Freedom. Each of these extraordinary Black women shared their thoughts, ideas, and deeply rooted movement projects in a continued effort to bring light to the struggles, hopes, and dreams of Black women and all of humanity alike.
MAKING DANCE: The Pillow Lab Provides a Necessary Space for Artists to Create
(Anastasia Stanmeyer for Berkshire Magazine, March 4, 2022)
Faculty of Color Fellows Panel
(Hampshire College, February 16, 2022)
Deborah Goffe (Associate Professor of Dance and Performance Curation), Lili Kim (Associate Professor of History and Global Migration), Susana Loza (Associate Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Media Studies) present on their recent work as part of Hampshire College’s Ethics and the Common Good Faculty of Color Fellows Panel. The panel was sponsored by Hampshire’s Community Commons and Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and was moderated by Roosbelinda Cardenas, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies and Co-Dean of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion.
Creative Capital Award
(January 12, 2022)
Scapegoat Garden’s Liturgy|Order|Bridge is one of 50 projects recognized by Creative Capital in 2022. Each project receives up to $50,000 in direct funding for the creation of groundbreaking new work in the visual arts, performing arts, literature, film, technology, and socially engaged and multidisciplinary practices, as well as scaffolding and infrastructure support via Creative Capital’s professional development programs, networking opportunities, and educational resources.
See dancers from all over New England during a weekend of Boston performances
(Karen Campbell for the Boston Globe, January 21, 2022)
CAs Virtual Porch Talks with André M. Zachary
(June 29 – July 1, 2021)
A series of three porch conversations between Deborah Goffe (@scapegoatgarden) & André M. Zachary (@amzrpg) during their 2021 residency at The Center for Afrofuturist Studies and Public Space One in Iowa City.
Afrofuturism as Expression: Literature, Dance, and Black Abstraction
(University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, June 20, 2021)
Afrofuturism is an invitation into the portals of Black possibilities within familiar and unfamiliar realms. In this partnership between the Stanley Museum of Art and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Derek (DK) Nnuro moderates a conversation with André Zachary, Nana Nkweti, and Deborah Goffe on the expressions of those possibilities in literature and dance, and a work of Black abstract art from the Stanley Museum of Art’s collection.
