PhD dance student Sidra Bell featured in new exhibit at the Met
Her work and role were highlighted in a New York Times article on the exhibition's live performances.
Dancer and choreographer Sidra Bell, who is pursuing a PhD from The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance, was recently commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to create a work for their major new exhibition, “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876—Now.” Both the resulting piece and Bell herself were prominently featured in a New York Times article about the live performances accompanying the exhibition.
Co-curator Akili Tommasino said he felt from the beginning that performance was an integral part of the history the show attempts to recount. “I couldn’t envision mounting this exhibition without giving it its proper space,” he added.
For Bell herself, the experience has been personally revelatory. In choreographing her work, she came to recognize in her own dancing “references to Egypt that have always been there, things that I thought were just abstract shapes and movements,” she told the Times. “I thought, oh, I’ve done that visually in my work, where did that come from? So that’s kind of a fun discovery, seeing where the symbols and semiotics of that culture have always undergirded my work. It’s an embodied archive.”
Bell joined Ohio State’s Department of Dance this year, first as a visiting artist and then as a PhD student. "Sidra’s decision to pursue a deeper exploration of the theoretical foundations of her work is one of the many reasons we were thrilled to welcome her as a doctoral candidate,” said Charles Anderson, chair of the department. “Her nuanced investigations of movement, identity, and the human experience—as powerfully exemplified in her performance within Flight Into Egypt—open transformative possibilities for both dance and dance studies. Sidra’s work inspires critical dialogue and holds the potential to forge new pathways for dance scholarship and artistry.”
G R A P H, the work Bell created for “Flight Into Egypt,” will be performed in the Met’s Performance Pyramid on Friday, Feb. 7, at 3 and 7 p.m.
