Presenting Voices Series

Keshet’s Presenting Voices Series engages artists in long-term, durational residency periods with multiple return visits from a single artist or company, to nurture deep and meaningful relationships with the New Mexico community. We lean into a “slow touring” model with intentional community building and room for joy, rest, and exploration. The Presenting Voices Series primarily focuses on artists who intentionally position their work at the intersection of dance and areas of social justice. Throughout each Presenting Voices residency (often over the course of multiple visits), visiting artists offer community conversations, workshops, and performances open to the public.

Current and recent Presenting Voices Artists/Companies:

Helanius J. Wilkins

Lafayette, LA / Boulder, CO

Keshet Presenting Voices Series 2023-present

Helanius J. Wilkins is an award-winning choreographer, performance artist, artivist, and educator who engages artmaking to forge paths towards social change and equitable landscapes. Helanius has choreographed and directed over 60 works, including two critically-acclaimed musical productions for Washington, DC’s Studio Theater – “Passing Strange” (2010) and “POP!” (2011). He founded and artistically directed EDGEWORKS Dance Theater in Washington DC, a dance company predominantly of Black men that existed for 13 years. EDGWORKS was the primary repository for his choreography from 2001 – 2014.

Currently performing his own choreography exclusively, he engages in a ritual: ritual as an experience of uncertainty that penetrates states of fatigue and exhaustion. At the core of his work are personal, lived experiences. Past performance experiences included the works of nationally recognized choreographers such as Robert Moses and Kevin Wynn and performing with Maida Withers’ Dance Construction Company (DC) and as a guest with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (MD).

Foundations and organizations including New England Foundation for the Arts (National Dance Project), National Performance Network, Colorado Creative Industries, the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts have supported his work. His honors include the 2008 Pola Nirenska Award for Contemporary Achievement in Dance, and the 2002 and 2006 Kennedy Center Local Dance Commissioning Project Award. Bates Dance Festival named him their 2002 Emerging Choreographer.

Helanius is a member of the National Board of Directors of the American College Dance Association for the Northwest region and serves on boards and advisory committees for Colorado state and nonprofit organizations. He was appointed in 2018 by Governor Jared Polis to the Colorado Council on Creative Industries and completed a 4-year term.

Helanius is currently Associate Chair and Director of Dance and a Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Colorado Boulder. His 25+ years career in the academy included various positions from guest artist in residence to visiting professor. Core to his work is providing a multilingual and multisensory approach to movement that deepens awareness, and that prepares students for the demands of an ever-changing field.

Leslie Parker 2024-present

Twin Cities, MN / Brooklyn, NY

Keshet Presenting Voices Series 2024-present

Leslie Parker is a dance artist, director, improviser, and performer born in the traditional homeland of Indigenous people, mostly the Dakhóta and Ojibwe people, also known as the Twin Cities, Minnesota. She has home art bases in both Brooklyn, NY and in the Twin Cities. Her deep roots in the territory also known as the St. Paul, Rondo community led her to a dance practice that emphasizes an organic aesthetic in experimental movement derived from the Black and African diaspora. Growing up in the Rondo community inspired her towards socially engaged art. Parker’s informal training began with marching in rhythm drill team competitions in the Rondo neighborhood learning from local organizers and activists.

Parker holds a BFA from Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, a MFA in Dance from Hollins University in partnership with the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and the Dresden Frankfurt Company in Frankfurt, Germany. She studied Senegalese dance forms at the Centre Culturel Blaise Senghor de Dakar in Senegal, West Africa.

As a dance creative, she highlights unique individual contributions, digs into collective memory to engage with the world more imaginatively and embodies an aesthetic that encompasses an organic physical/movement that includes: Traditional W. African, Black/African American vernacular/social dance, Improvisation, and Contemporary/Modern technique derived from and exchanged across multiple continents. She has received a 2022 McKnight Fellowship for Choreographers, a NEFA/NDP award 2021 and was a Jerome Artist Fellow 2019 – 2021, 2017 Bessie award for Outstanding performer.