STORYVILLE

Dedicated to showcasing contemporary films and media works produced by Philadelphia-based independent media artists.

Germaine Ingram (Cover Your Stage)  is a Philadelphia PA-based jazz percussive dancer, choreographer, song writer, vocal/dance improviser, oral historian, and cultural strategist and archivist. She creates evening-length pieces that explore themes related to history, collective memory and social justice, and designs arts/culture projects that explore and illuminate community cultural history.

Plenty of Good Women Dancers (2004, 53 min.) recounts the journey to producing a 1994 Philadelphia revue of the artistry and spunk of senior Black veterans of the popular stage of the early-mid-20thCentury, with focus on Black women tap dancers, whose contributions were overlooked and undervalued.

Cover Your Stage evokes the process of combing local archives for resonances of Louise Madison (1911-1971), an elusive, but exceptional, woman tap dancer from Philadelphia who was among the Black women who used the popular stage to subvert racism and sexism.  

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Debora Kodish (Plenty of Good Women Dancers) was the founding Director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project (1987-2014). Plenty was her first longer-form film collaboration at PFP. For the last year and a half she has been co-producing documentary media supporting the Save Chinatown movement.

Barry Dornfeld (Plenty of Good Women Dancers) Barry Dornfeld is a documentary filmmaker, media researcher, and educator and organizational consultant. His documentary work, which has been shown on public television and won awards at festivals and competitions, includes: Eatala: A Life in Klezmer, LaVaughn Robinson; Dancing, History, Gandy Dancers, portraying the expressive culture and history of African-American railroad workers in the US, and broadcast nationally on PBS, Look Forward and Carry on the Past: Stories from Philadelphia’s Chinatown, broadcast nationally on PBS.