Riddick Dance in Residency at Piedmont Arts

On the week of March 13, Piedmont Arts hosted Riddick Dance for in-school performances, workshops, and a gallery performance. For the first two days of their stay in Martinsville, Riddick Dance performed at Laurel Park Middle School and Martinsville Middle School and offered a dance workshop to the Carlisle Upper School. Their residency culminated in a public performance in the Piedmont Arts galleries, nestled between the Hanging Tree Guitars exhibit and the Rupe Dalton Retrospective. This performance deeply moved the audience and it ended to thunderous applause.

Riddick Dance is a dance company based out of Hampton, Virginia who features a broad repertory, expressive movement, and a fusion of dance styles. Riddick Dance performed three pieces: Limerick of Our Souls, a dance-theater assortment including love stories, poems, and speeches; ONE, a mixed media piece dealing with love, loss, forgiveness, and conflict resolution through the enlightening, meditative music of Alice Coltrane; and The King Project, improvisational dance theater laced in visual projections based on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches, "I Have a Dream" and "I’ve Been to the Mountain Top," and his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Followed by a talkback, audience members had the opportunity to ask questions of the dancers about their inspirations, backgrounds, and deeper meanings in the dance pieces.