“She is a riveting performer (as anyone who saw her when she was with Spectrum can attest), but in her own work, her terrific facility coalesced with her unique artist’s voice to transfixing effect. ”
Jade Solomon Curtis is a choreographer, dance artist and curator interested in the body as an artifact of memory, space and time. Through the lens of a contemporary Black woman, the integration of Black vernacular movements with contemporary dance, innovative technology and Hip Hop cultural influences her works ponder tradition and reinvention, social justice, social constructs as well as intuition and logic- often resulting in the subversion of an idea.
Her work, Black Like Me: An Exploration of the Word Nigger, is a multi-sensory dance work that explores the reverb of a single word in a global community. It considers the effects of the word nigger, all its permutations, its history and its casual use in Hip Hop culture. It asks if it is possible to redefine a word that was intended to belittle a people.
Curtis is currently in development for her newest mixed media dance work, Keeper of Sadness (KOS).
KOS | Photo by Jim Coleman
Solomon Curtis is the founder of Solo Magic, a non-profit arts initiative that collaborates with innovative artists to create socially relevant work, “Activism is the Muse”. She is also the creator and co-curator of the Radical Black Femme Project (www.RBFP.org), a global residency program that supports creative work in the realm of resisting racism, subverting transphobia, and supporting justice, safety, and equity with an emphasis on counter culture conversations.
Solomon Curtis is a recipient of the 2018 New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project. She is a 2018 Artist Trust Fellow and a 2017 University of South Carolina Inaugural Visiting Fellow. Curtis received the 2017 Seattle Office of Arts & Culture CityArts Project Award, and the 2017 4Culture Artist Project Award. Her work has received support from the Bossak-Heilbron Charitable Foundation, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Artist Trust, Central District Forum for Art & Ideas and 4Culture. Curtis is a 2019 artist-in-residence at SLIPPAGE Lab at Duke University and a 2018 Base Experimental + Art artist-in-residence.
A celebrated soloist of Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater for four seasons, Curtis is the subject of an Emmy Award-winning short film, Jade Solomon Curtis directed by Ralph Bevins. She received SeattleDance’s first Dance Crush Award for Performance/Choreography in the riveting workshop of Black Like Me that lead to further development and funding from the National Dance Project.
BLM | Photo by Daniel Barnes
“A poignant and pointed look at historic and ongoing oppression, Black Like Me demands that we confront our own privileges, prejudices, and deeply-ingrained wounds.”
Jade Solomon Curtis in Keeper of Sadness, a work in progress.
Photos by Jim Coleman.
