In Dayton, Ohio in the late ’40s several black mothers approached two well-known dance teachers in the area and asked if the they would teach their children modern dance. One of those children, Jeraldyne Blunden, took over the dance school in 1960 and founded The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company in 1968. She founded the company as a place where black artists could find fellowship, learn and grow in dance, choreography, design and other arts, according to Kevin Ward, the artistic director for the company.

“Those are our roots, and certainly a lot of the works that we do are based on African-American themes, but its not solely African-American,” he said. “The company is multicultural, but those are our roots and we maintain our roots fairly well.”

In honor of those roots, the company is performing The Jacob Lawrence Production.

“Jacob Lawrence was, for a large part of the 20th century, a preeminent black artist,” Ward said.

Ward’s job is to be responsible for how the company looks and functions, as well as the choreographers hired and the selection of performances. He said he, along with three other choreographers, has worked hard to make the dances stay true to the ideas behind Lawrence’s work.

“All of us … we’ve come at the Jacob Lawrence opus from very different angles, but as you watch the program, his artwork, his life, permeates the entire production from top to bottom,” Ward said.

Lawrence’s work used a lot of bold shapes and flat fields. He also utilized rhythmic patterns, and because he felt abstraction was cold and sterile, his artwork abounds with the human figure and human context, Ward said.

To express the vibrance and diversity of Lawrence’s artwork, Ward said he chose three other choreographers to create the dances for the production: Donald Byrd, Reggie Wilson and Rennie Harris.

“With each individual choreographer that took many different turns,” he said.

Ward said some representations are very literal, such as Byrd’s rendition of Lawrence’s Harriet Tubman series. Other dances, though, draw on the themes present throughout Lawrence’s work. Wilson used the themes of migration and the transfer of culture from one place to another to fuel his moves. Harris used the design elements behind two very strong black and white paintings, “Dixie Cafe” and “One-way Ticket,” to infuse his dance steps with imagery.

Ward said that for his own dance routine he drew inspiration from several of Lawrence’s paintings in the ’60s, during the civil rights movement.

“[I] linked the works together to create a dance about artistic process, about creation,” Ward said.