This is a performance duet created by Rhonda Moore, a 69-year-old Black veteran dancer and novice acrobat and Ben Grinberg, a 35-year-old queer Jewish acrobat and novice dancer. Helpful Hints is inspired by the whimsical 1901 book Illustrated Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People by Adrian Peter Schmidt. This project reimagines turn-of-the-century fitness advice through an intergenerational, embodied lens, exploring the evolving definitions of strength, health, and readiness across time and lived experience.
Bio of presenter – Almanac Projects is the producer of Helpful Hints, created by Rhonda Moore and Ben Grinberg. Grinberg and Moore have been collaborating since 2020. As individual artists – Ben Grinberg and Rhonda Moore each have a long history of community practice. Moore’s decades-long career as a dancer, recording artist, and performance maker has spanned geographies from New York City to Verona, Italy, to Philadelphia for over a decade, always including innovative community-informed and community-integrated works of dance. In 2010, inspired by the absurdity of the American immigration system, she created Random Acts of Dance, which, through several iterations brought students, elders, and other community groups out into the street to perform a spontaneous and infectious “random act of dance.” This project was ultimately re-commissioned by Mural Arts Philadelphia and featured in the open of the Mural Mile.