WNY Dance: Headliner Omari Wiles & Les Ballet Afrik to present ‘New York Is Burning’

By Arts Journalism Collective

For Sukanya Burman, dance is more than just movement to music. 

“Dance is more than just a moving body; it’s a story,” says Burman, the founder and director of the Jamestown Dance Festival. 

The festival starts today (see schedule below), with performances, workshops and happenings featuring Omari Wiles & Les Ballet Afrik, Sri Thina Dance, Shobana Jeyasingh Dance and the Akram Kahn Company. HERE is the ticket link.

The events bring a world dance perspective to Jamestown with Indian classical dance, modern and contemporary dance, West African dance and even voguing.

“When we think about dance, we’re pulling in ideas of migration, identity, and cultural belonging. It comes from personal experiences, of course, but it also comes through stories,” Burman said in an interview Wednesday. 

For Burman, dance is not just as performance, but a form of activism and community-building. She described dance as a language that can go beyond words, addressing sociopolitical issues, cultural identity and emotions without being spoken aloud. 

While there are diverse populations in Chautauqua County, particularly in Jamestown and Dunkirk/Fredonia, she said that richness is not always visible on local stages. That’s something the festival seeks to address. 

That is something that the festival looks to address. 

This year’s lineup is highlighted by Omari Wiles & Les Ballet Afrik performing their “New York Is Burning,” an homage to the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” that spotlighted African-American, Latino, gay and transgender cultures in the drag ball scene in New York.  The original documentary will also be screened (with free admission) as part of the festival.

Burman said she saw Wiles perform in 2022 at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Mass., and had kept him in mind for the festival.

“Queerness and dance exist together, hand in hand,” Burman explained. “Pop culture oftentimes borrows a lot from queer culture, and it gets really commercialized in a way where there’s no credit given to those Black and brown artists who really revolutionized dance in the ballroom scene in Harlem in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.”

That was where “voguing” came into the popular culture, hitting the mainstream when Madonna had a hit with “Vogue” in 1990. 

Wiles will conduct a voguing workshop as part of the festival. 

RELATED MEDIA: 2025 JAMESTOWN DANCE FESTIVAL PROMO VIDEOS

Wiles was born in Senegal and grew up in Brooklyn, training with his family’s Maimouna Keita School of African Dance. His mother, Marie Basse-Wiles, is a major figure in the African Diaspora dance world. 

He went on to found Les Ballet Afrik, combining  African dance with house and vogue styles. In February he received an Obie Award (for Off-Broadway theater in New York) as the co-choreographer for “The Jellicle Ball,” a version of “Cats” set amid ballroom culture. 

It cost about $70,000 to produce the festival, with much of the funding coming from grants and foundations. Most of the money goes toward paying the performers. 

Burman said one of the festival’s goals is keep it affordable so audiences can be exposed to dance. 

Burman said that between 60% and 70% of the funding for this festival goes solely towards ensuring that dancers are paid fairly, with a good chunk of the rest going toward making ticket prices accessible as well as selling tickets at highly discounted rates for students, and even making some free for certain community members.

“We really want people to be a part of this, to enjoy, to participate, to interact and engage, and we’re just making sure that cost is not a barrier to participation,” she said.

Burman has hopes of creating a space for anyone and everyone to enjoy dance. 

“When I saw (“New York Is Burning”), I felt that it’s so very vital for us in this community, for people to see that dance exists beyond the traditional norms. People are creating great work.”      

The performers are chosen after festival organizers see them perform in person in order to get the full experience and feelings from their performance as opposed to looking into them online or simply watching their work through social media.

“We really want to see not just what the performance is, but how audiences are reacting to it,” she said. “Because when we are bringing performances to Jamestown, and because we are understanding our community better and better every year we are doing this, we understand what works here and what would not work here. And then we are slowly kind of introducing newer ideas to audiences here.”

“So the idea is like slowly exposing our community to different ways of dancing and kind of changing minds around what dance can be.”

The Kolkata, India-born Burman runs Sukanya Burman Dance in Jamestown, where she teaches the two kinds of traditional Indian dance she has expertise in alongside modern dance. She trained at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. 

“Dance is just a language, and it’s not limited to a specific culture,” she said. “So you don’t have to be South Asian or Indian to learn Indian classical dance forms. It is just a vocabulary. … So we have a lot of students who come from non-Indian backgrounds who are taking classes and workshops. All of our company members train in all three forms, modern and two forms of Indian classical, because our choreography demands it.”

OTHER FEATURED PERFORMERS (In addition to Les Ballet Afrik and Sukanya Burman Dance):
Sri Thina
Grace Gibbons
Star Lawson
MahataMmoho Collective

The festival this year will feature Indian and Afro-Caribbean dance as well as Les Ballet Afrik. Here is the full schedule: 

Thursday, Sept. 4

Workshop – Les Ballet Afrik  Vogueing Workshop – Jamestown Community College, 5-6:30 p.m. 

Performance – Indian Classical Night – Scharmann Theater, Jamestown Community College,  7:30-9 p.m. 

Friday, Sept. 5

Performance – Les Ballet Afrik “NEW YORK IS BURNING” –Reg Lenna Center for the Arts – 7:30-9 p.m. 

 

Saturday, Sept. 6

Workshop – Intro to Indian Classical – Sukanya Burman Dance – 10-11:30 a.m.

Performance – Regional Artist Showcase – Scharmann Theater, Jamestown Community College – 2-4 p.m.

Performance (Buffalo) – Les Ballet Afrik “NEW YORK IS BURNING” –Torn Space Theater – 7:30-9 p.m.

 

Sunday, Sept. 7 

Workshop – Megan A. Evans-Rakeepile (MahataMmoho) Modern Dance (Dunham Technique)- Sukanya Burman Dance – 10-11:30 a.m.

Film Screening – “Paris is Burning” Screening – Sukanya Burman Dance – 12-1:30 p.m. (Free event)

Community After Party & Mixer – Sukanya Burman Dance, 2-4:00 p.m.  (Free event) 

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This story was produced as the Arts Journalism Collective by the Arts Journalism class at SUNY Fredonia as part of the SUNY Institute for Local News initiative. Contributors in the group’s interview with Sukanya Burman included Brennan Anderson, Charlie Bergeron, Olivia Castigione, Mia Ciechalski, Landon Lyons, Ximena Ramirez Hernandez, Maisie Strader, Macayla Miller, Julia Hyman, London Nickolai and Harrison Schmitt.