Aqualumina Festival
featuring Ancestral Lights, a site specific outdoor dance performance
Please join us from 6 to 8 PM on October 22nd and 23rd for the inauguration of ArtYard’s annual Aqualumina Festival, a riverside lantern festival involving music, performance, and inspiring lighting at the river’s edge.
This event launches this year with a performance of Brian Sanders’ JUNK in Ancestral Lights, a site-specific outdoor dance performance illuminating refugee narratives and kindling light in a time of darkness and displacement. Ancestral Lights grew from JUNK’s residency and hugely popular open rehearsal at ArtYard in June and employs community-constructed lanterns made in the ArtYard workshop by members of our community.
The music was a three-way collaboration between Brian Sandrer’s JUNK, Oran Etkin, and Mad Beatz Philly during a residency at ArtYard.
Brian Sanders’ JUNK is known for their ingenious use of found objects and clever inventions that bridge the gap between dance and physical theater. Sanders’ choreography blends traditional dance theater with an inventiveness and physicality that gives reason for critics to hail JUNK as “Philly’s most imaginative perpetrator of dare-devilish physical theater” and declare Sanders as “the city’s most exciting choreographer.” JUNK maintains its home season in Philadelphia, PA each fall as a mainstay of the FringeArts Festival.
