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Take the Cake
Commissioned by Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Take the Cake is a permanent public mural over 20 meters in length that fills the light-box crowning DJD’s new building in the heart of Calgary’s Beltline. The mural is a representation of dancers’ shadows rendered in bright colours. At night, these high chroma figures are animated by an accompanying multi-coloured LED light choreography, making it appear as though the figures are in movement, dancing across the top of the building.
The Cakewalk is an historical dance form and an early antecedent of jazz dance. It was invented in the 1850s by enslaved Black people in the Southern States, parodying the Minuet ball dance popular at parties of their captors –white plantation owners. In an original Cakewalk, dancers would parade in pairs in a grand march with an exaggerated grace that was both comedic and subversive – the couple judged to be the winners would “take the cake.” The Cakewalk, a choreography of Black resistance, contributed to the development of musical theatre, ragtime, jazz, and contemporary competitive dance forms like Breakdance, Voguing and Freestyle battles.
The imagery for Take the Cake was gathered by working with DJD’s Artistic Director Kimberley Cooper and the DJD dancers to create a contemporary Cakewalk. The dancers’ shadows – cast on the wall of the studio with multi-coloured lights— were filmed and translated into the silhouettes that have become the mural’s figures.
Take the Cake welcomes visitors to DJD by inviting them to consider the powerful, fraught and rich histories of movement forms, and echoes the activity of pedestrians at street level in a celebration of community and collaboration.
Documentation by Noel Bégin