{"id":1057,"date":"2026-07-20T12:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cdfilmfestival.com\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2026-07-20T12:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:26:13","slug":"sending-up-the-timber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cdfilmfestival.com\/?p=1057","title":{"rendered":"Sending Up the Timber"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Interweaving Liturgical, pantomime, and modern dance aesthetics, the work continues the development of Aun’Suh, a character born in a previously choreographed work by Alexandria Davis titled dem chillun kum ba yah attuhw’ile (phonetically: “the children will come by here after a while”). Aun’Suh devotes herself to cultivating spiritual community through unwavering faith, reckoning with a labor-less future while actively constructing a legacy through prayer, protest, and rituals of divine kinship. Sending Up the Timber takes place in a nameless place, neither fully past nor present, examining the invisible boundaries of a peacefully united afterlife. Drawing inspiration from Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s Ancient Future exhibition and Davis\u2019s unpublished essay “Exploring an Ancient Future Like Us in Retrospect,” the work investigates an intracultural connection to a recollected African diaspora unimpacted by the African Imperialism and European Colonization that instigated the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Here, what is right or wrong, fiction, myth, or fact, is not governed by the embodied sophistication or criticisms of negritude. Drawing on the concept of \u201cCome as you are,\u201d this work aims to reimagine the ancient undoing of sin and religion, encouraging its audience to explore the ways they have employed ancestral technologies to support their approach to wholeness and kinship. Where dance and song serve as shared language for spiritual breakthrough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In collaboration with dancers Heather Mitchell, Akilah Moore, and Amaya Skeene, with creative input from Antonio Disla (University of Michigan Drama professor and co-founder of A2D2 Theatre), the dance film Sending Up the Timber was devised during a two-day dance intensive on November 29 & 30, 2025, at Michigan State University. During the collaborative process, Davis used the Dancing Back to Self creative methodology to work with each dancer, cataloging memory and conversation as tools for embodying ancestral knowledge as a technology. Through movement, voice, and ritual, the film Sending Up the Timber explores the juxtaposition of dance, memory, and imagination as tools for interdimensional placemaking using embodied prayer as a form of ancient black technology for healing, resilience, and self-examination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n