CINCINNATI — Rashaad Rice, 16, has been passionate about dancing since the age of 8.
Rice has been a part of dozens of performances over the years.
He said performing is one of his favorite parts of dancing.
"Being able to perform and do other roles. Because each time I perform, I feel like I grow,” Rice said.
Rice is a student at the School of Creative and Performing Arts.
He said the training he has received at the school has made him into the dancer he is today.
“When I got in that’s when I really stuck to it and was like, Oh, this is what I want to do,” Rice said. “I would say probably fourth-grade is when I really started training and dance and stuff like that.”
Over the next couple of months, Rice and other dancers will be working on the choreography of “Shout.”
It’s a musical about the lives of five individuals and their experience with Christianity and sexuality
But the story comes with a twist.
“I’ve done a lot of shows with Revolution Dance over the years and when I found out the basic premise and the storyline of it, it was a story that I felt like not everyone needed to hear, but what they needed to hear,” said Rice.
David Choate, the Revolution Dance Theatre producing and artistic director, put the show together with the help of Artswave’s Pride Grant.
It’s a $15,000 grant awarded to four arts organizations to help LGBTQ productions or programs.
Shout is one of them.
“Shout was originally scheduled to happen as a live production as a part of our season last year,” Choate said. “It was actually the most anticipated show of the season but unfortunately it got canceled.”
But that didn’t stop the show from going on.
Instead, they profiled five people in the community.
“We took a documentary of their stories and still filmed the dancers interpreting their stories through dance and putting that into a documentary/film version,” he said. “So what we’re excited to do now is take that original concert, merge it with this documentary, and actually come up with a live performance.”
As for Rice, he said he’s appreciative of this pride grant because it’s helping them tell a story that needs to be told through this production.
“If people come to see this show it’s portrayed in such a beautiful way that people may not even agree with it, but they’ll listen to it and I feel like that’s the most important thing,” Rice said.
Shout is expected to debut in the summer of 2021.