JUNE NEWSLETTER 

YSDT at National Organization for Women
Women of Power and Influence Awards: June 16th 

Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre is honored to participate in this amazing event celebrating the achievements of  extraordinary women in business, finance, entrepreneurship, law, politics and the arts. This year's award ceremony will be held at the Tribeca Rooftop and includes live and silent auctions as well as an exclusive live performance by YSDT. For more information on the event click here. For a sneak preview of Frozen Belief II, the piece to be performed by YSDT, click on the video below. 

Frozen Belief II

The visually stunning Frozen Belief II uses flour as a metaphor for faith to explore the relationship of three individuals' to their own beliefs and the universality of the religious experience.

YSDT & Star Mountain Rehabilitation Center 

This April YSDT Artistic Director Samar Haddad King and dancer Katie Schetlick taught movement workshops at the Star Mountain Rehabilitation Center, a school for children with special needs located near Ramallah. For individuals with mental and physical disabilites, creative movement classes can be liberating and empowering. When students are given the tools and freedom to create and perform their own movement, it enables them to see their own abilities as unique, valid and valuable, as you can see in the brief video below. To learn more about the Star Mountain Rehabilitation Center, and to read about YSDT company members' experiences in working with this population on the YSDT blog, click here. 

Star Mountain Rehabilitation Center

Katie's Kickstarter Success Story 

Katie recently returned from her trip to Ramallah with a renewed stash of spices and a reawakened sense of wonder at the world that is full of movement, full of beauty and full of contradictions (like the one seen to the left, where traditional Debke dancers rehearse in the latest Nike sneakers). Thanks to your support Katie was able to meet her entire fundraising goal and thereby pay for the entire trip! Katie and all of us here at YSDT would like to thank all of you who supported her journey either by donating to her Kickstarter campaign or simply by following her blog posts online.

While in the Middle East Katie worked with Samar and local artists on the creation of Bound where she acted as a three dimensional ambassador between the two dimensional screens of Ramallah and New York, and documented her own  investigation of 'found movements' through video, audio recordings and photographs of her trip. You can view more images and video from her time abroad on her website Found Movement.