The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The LGBT Community Center host dancer, choreographer, and poet Ian Spencer Bell in a solo performance of Marrow, Thursday, March 17 and Friday, March 18 at 8 p.m. at The Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 101.

$15 suggested donation to support The Center’s youth programs and the Bureau. Tickets at gaycenter.org/marrow

Following the performance, please join Ian Spencer Bell for a reception in the Bureau, room 210.

 
In Marrow, Bell’s most recent work since Holler, Bell dances 10 poems about self, place, family, dancing, and what it was like growing up queer in rural Virginia. Several of the poems are retellings of folk stories and gossip Bell heard as a young person. The short, confessional narratives explore love, death, art, and home. Bell often speaks to himself as he dances. Other times, he addresses his parents or moves in silence. “I have tried to say the things I am most afraid to say,” Bell says. The program runs about 25 minutes.

In an essay for CultureRover.net about Bell’s 2015 Poetry Foundation performance of Holler, historian Michael J. Kramer 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. He trained at North Carolina School of the Arts, School of American Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Bell studies in the MFA in poetry program at NYU.

For more information, please contact ianspencerbelldance@gmail.com.