Biba Bell Breathes Life into Art: Deviating from Traditional Structures of Performance
By Camryn Eaglin
Biba Bell morphs the shape of the artistic box that many of us feel expected to exist in. The standard forms of performance are nothing but a thing. As Biba breathes life into her artwork, she incorporates her surroundings such as nature, architecture, and lived experiences—past, present, and future—in order to create atmospheric and experiential performance environments for herself and audiences. For the artist that finds themselves stuck in a pool of dead-end ideas or feeling uninspired, there is always inspiration to be uncovered, redefined, and repurposed. Biba Bell shows us that.
Who is Biba Bell?
Detroit based artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer Biba Bell is a tenured associate professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She teaches and develops work on her collegiate dance students while simultaneously creating pieces within her community. As a diverse mover, how would Bell describe her individual movement style? It’s quite an eclectic mix. Bell describes it as “highly physical movement, [which] could be full-out, full-bodied, vigorous dancing or subtle, intensely attenuated, [and an] internal experience.”
Throughout Bell’s career she’s trained with various teachers in styles such as Cunningham, Limón, contact improvisation, Horton, somatics oriented ballet and Afro-Haitian—just to name a few. She credits her educators such as Silvia Martins, Blanche Brown, Mel Wong, Ellie Klopp, and Barbara Mahler—she noted a list of great teachers—as the sources for her movement vocabulary. This has developed into her classes being centered around the amalgamation of said styles. For Bell, she says teaching allows her to spend time with her past teachers in some respects. She explained how she’s constantly “evoking them through exercises and movement explorations, and honoring the embodied knowledge that have been transmitted to [her] from and through many incredible teachers, dancers, and artists.” She uses various methodologies to create a fine blend that is a unique, fluid way of moving.
Through this, she hopes her students will connect their movement with the culture, history, and somatic feeling embodied through such styles. She wants her students to “consider their work outside of the studio context and in the world.” Bell says her classes are a space to play with hybridity. As a former student of Biba Bell, I can attest that her classes were a refreshing wild card. We moved our bodies differently each day, taking time to reflect on our movement, where it comes from, and the idea of intentionality.
Out of the Black Box, and into the World.
To Bell, a performance space is right beneath her feet. She has previously made performance spaces out of gardens, stairways, rooftops, overpasses, fields, and people’s homes. From the most mundane spaces, to the most extraordinary, to those overlooked, for Bell there is always a story to be unearthed or translated into movement. Site-specificity is one of her favorite performance spaces of choice; limits hardly exist. “Working within specific sites opens up the senses to incorporate context, history, practices, and somatic feel of the work in ways that are, for me, sometimes less fulfilling within a black box or white cube context,” Bell says.
How can one take a seemingly ordinary or even an extraordinary occurrence in nature and shape a performance around it? From the curvature of the roadsides, to the archway of the bridge, the texture of the grass, the swaying of the trees, and the view from a rooftop. These places live in existence all around us. But do we take the time to breed context and connect it back to our being and the world around us? She does. With her PhD in performance studies, she researched performance in regards to architecture, community, environment, as well as social and personal aspects of our lives. Within her dissertation, “Dancing There: Spaces of Contemporary Choreography,” Bell also researched embodiment in relation to memory, archive, practice, and identity. She pulls from such ideas when cultivating work. From concepts, texts, music or sound, textile, or narrative, Bell finds the world around us as the heartbeat, the life source for her art.
Also as a collaborator, she has worked with artists in other disciplines such as visual artists, musician-composers, theater directors, and architects. She enjoys the learning curve of crossing mediums and the difficulty to “translate and get lost in translation.” She’s keen on being present with other creatives. For Bell, collaboration brings ancestral perspectives that can enhance the next person’s voice.
Nowhere Near Twilight—What’s Next for Biba Bell?
Her creativity is still in bloom and her dancing desires are far from waning. “At 46 years old, I don’t feel like my dancing body is anywhere near twilight. I will be dancing as long as I’m living,” says Bell. For her, creating concrete, long term plans hasn’t always been her M.O. Her next steps tend to flow based on the people and environments around her. However, she does hope to cross international space and teach abroad one day in order to mix cultural experiences. She says another uncharted territory for her would be choreographing for an opera or musical theater production. Choreographing for large scale productions would be a welcomed challenge to expand on space and aesthetic movement.
More recently, her current project in development will be titled, “Tree Dances: Epiphytic Choreographies and (Para)sites of Eco-activism.” In Bell’s words, “The piece focuses on choreography, activism, and ecology through practices of tree-sitting.” It will explore the natural relationship between epiphytes—air-plants who live in trees—and parasites and how they support sustainable ecosystems. Set in the forest, this work delves into the complexity of colonial and indigenous histories. Bell is also collaborating with visual artist Meg Heeres. Heeres’ artistic medium is creating sculptures and paper out of invasive plants. Bell will share a performance event during Meg Heeres’ exhibition. This will take place at the Simone de Sousa Gallery in Detroit, Michigan and will be held late summer 2023.
To keep up with Biba Bell’s artistic endeavors be sure to check out her website here: https://www.bibabell.com/
Camryn Eaglin is a professional dancer, dance teacher, writer, and creative, with experience in video editing and graphic design. Eaglin is a Wayne State University graduate with her Bachelor of Science in Dance and a minor in Broadcast Journalism. When she’s not dancing, she’s still creating, seeking out all of the creative experiences that exist around her.
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