News & Updates
Please join us in honoring these seven incredible women and their contributions to the Greater Milwaukee community!
Photo by Aliza Barzan for Milwaukee Magazine
Ko-Thi Dance Company Named as NEA CARES Act Award Recipient! - 7/1/2020
Ko-Thi was recently named one of 855 CARES Act Relief Funding recipients, chosen from a pool of over 3,100 applicants nationwide. Read more here!
From Our Founder
As the founder of Ko-Thi Dance Company, I am grateful, humbled, and sincerely overwhelmed with the tenacity, curiosity, respectfulness, and zeal with which our team has grown. They continue to reach back while setting their eyes on the future. In 2020, our country is having to deal with not only a pandemic, but also issues of systemic racism. At the core of this ongoing struggle continues to be our educational system and how we address the "true" history of America with all of its flaws and potential. How we reform, rebuild, and reconnect our relationships and definitions about what the idea of “America” truly means, and who does it include in its nest.
Ko-Thi’s SANKOFA 2020 project is imbedded with a celebration of our past, a 51 year legacy, initiated by its new generation of leadership. Using that lineage as their firm foundation on which to stand, Ko-Thi heralds in a revived respect for its legacy as a guiding force while making an audacious leap into the future.
The arts serve as our binder. It, along with a total revamping of our educational system, can become a means towards a meaningful inclusion of all cultures making it an amazing American experiment in social justice, hope, and freedom for all its citizens.
SANKOFA is the beginnings of a series of dialogues that Ko-Thi Dance Company hopes to create as we continue to contribute, inform, stimulate, educate, and preserve a rich cultural heritage.
I hope you enjoy the series.
Black Lives Matter!
Love,
Mama Ferne
KTDC Artistic Director DeMar Walker talks art, legacy, and the Sankofa Series with Shepherd Express A&E Editor John Schneider