The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center host dancer, choreographer, and poet Ian Spencer Bell in a solo performance of his blend of poetry and dance in room 101 of The Center on Thursday, June 4, at 7 PM.

Join Ian for a reception following the performance in the Bureau, room 210 of The Center at 8 PM

Suggested donation of $5 
No one turned away for lack of funds

Bell danced a version of Geography Solos last spring in New York as part of his evening- length work Elsewhere. On March 11, 2015, Bell performed a new version of Geography Solos at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. For the premiere, Bell added three poems, “The Apostle,” “Beards,” and “For Those Who Come to San Francisco.” On the streets of New York City, in the hills of LA and San Francisco, and in a laundromat in Virginia, Bell contemplates place, self, and love. In his long poem Holler, Bell catalogues the contents of his childhood home near the Shenandoah Valley. This will be the New York premiere of Holler.

Historian Michael J. Kramer, in an essay for CultureRover.net about the Poetry Foundation performance, wrote that Bell danced “both outside the poems looking in at them and within their poetic and musical infrastructures … he neither merely illustrated his words, nor only accompanied the poems with dance—but instead lingered in a space between the two.”

Bell has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Summer Stages Dance, Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Jacob’s Pillow, where he performed with his group on the Inside/Out Stage. Bell trained at North Carolina School of the Arts, School of American Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with New York State Poet Marie Howe.