Kalila Kingsford Smith Dance Presents I Spy, With My Little Eye in the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival

I Spy, With My Little Eye slides down the Chutes and Ladders of youth into the Scrabble of your earliest memories. This interactive dance performance provides an opportunity to Connect Four a moment in the shared joys and toys of childhood experience. In this first performance by Kalila Kingsford Smith Dance (KKSD), the audience is invited to bring a childlike attention to the world.

This 55 minute show will run for 5 performances from September 12-15 at Mascher Space Cooperative in Kensington. General admission is $20, student tickets are $15, and children under the age of 12 can receive a discounted ticket at $5. Seating is limited. Audiences will be invited to participate during the performance.

Through five sections, eight dancers search for unified experiences that highlight moments of togetherness, of childhood friends, of special places that inspire our imaginations, of collecting precious items that define our personalities. Accompanied by original music by Alina John, we move together in spontaneous games of I Spy, Tag, Hopscotch, and Whisper Down The Lane in an exploration of presence and fun, dancing ourselves into a playful reflection on what it was like to be a kid.

Kalila Kingsford Smith Dance is a project-based collection of dancer-artists who build interactive environments in which the dance crosses the perceived boundaries between audience and performer. Each dance is a product of the creative energies of all involved; the performers, the creative collaborators, and the audience.

Philadelphia native Kalila Kingsford Smith is an independent choreographer, performer, and dance educator. She has performed in the works of Dianne McIntyre, Paul Taylor, Mary Anthony, José Limón, Pauline Koner, Gwendolyn Bye, Stephen Welsh, and other local dance artists. Informed by her training in modern and contemporary dance, her choreography flows between tension and release, momentum and suspension, improvisation and composition, and storytelling and abstraction. Her choreography has been presented throughout Philadelphia, including at Leah Stein’s Studio Works, the Come Together Festival, the Fringe Festival, SoLow Fest, and InHale Performance Series. As a dance educator at Temple and Drexel University, she teaches courses in modern dance technique, improvisation, choreography, dance history and theory. Kalila is also a writer and editor with thINKingDANCE.net. Kalila received her MA in Dance from Temple University, a BFA in Dance and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan.