#dancing while black

Black Joy.

Dancing While Black: https://bit.ly/LWBlack

When I was in primary, I was in ballet. I loved it. I ate, slept, and breathed it. I danced as I walked and practiced wherever I was. One day, we were to have a recital. In addition to my own class's routine, the teachers wanted *me* to be in a scene with the older girls! I was so excited because I was the only little kid they had chosen. But my parents said 'no' and were adamant about this. I was devastated! I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let me. I thought they’d be proud, but they just seemed really weird and irritated about it.

I was a good dancer - the best in my class for a time. My teachers even recommend me for the intensive training program later... My sister and I also just happened to be the only black girls at the school. The "part" was for me to wear a coat with tails, gloves, and slowly carry a tray to the two (white) principle dancers, stand up-stage for their entire dance, and carry the tray off at the end.

A servant.

At the time, I didn’t understand anything about the racist implications of giving me that role (but holy sh*t, now??!?! wtf?!).

The teachers probably thought my parents were being “sensitive” and “creating a problem.” But it didn’t matter. They were going to protect me. From the blatant racism (as much as they could), from playing that awful stereotype, and from internalizing that I was in any way less-than.

[#DANCE #TOWNHALLl] Dance Caribbean Collective Townhall  Presented by Dance Caribbean Collective in partnership with Dancing While Black Thursday, May 4 | 6pm WOODY TANGER AUDITORIUM | Brooklyn College Library | 1st Floor 2900 Bedford Road Brooklyn, NY 11210 Admission: FREE  Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/419577348382307/

The Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE Town Hall will provide an opportunity to delve into the pressing issue of cultural appropriation. Panelists and attendees will offer thoughtful perspectives and examples of the Caribbean influence in popular culture, and explore how these influences are submerged or erased. What is at stake for Caribbean communities as our cultural genius proliferates worldwide? What efforts are needed on the part of artists, entrepreneurs, and audiences to care for our culture and livelihood in this time? Come offer up your opinion and take in the thoughts of the community. 

Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE's residency at Brooklyn College is part of the CUNY Dance Initiative, which receives major support from The Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Additional support provided by the Jerome Robbins Foundation and the Harkness Foundation for Dance. CDI is spearheaded and administered by The Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College. www.cuny.edu/danceinitiative 

As I left the shores of T&T, Jason and I started making our list of what we enjoyed about our experience. I wanted to share this with you. I know how hard you all worked and when it comes to feedback it is often easy for folks to focus on the ways to improve. Well I want to share the ways you have already hit it spot on! Check out what we have begun to compile. And I don't think we are yet finished!

1. It was in Trinidad!!!! 2. Coordinated with Dancing While Black! 3. I got to work with FABULOUS men both "dance insiders" and "outsiders." 4. Choreographers opening their processes to more participants (and local dancers). Creating greater community. 5. Living together - evenings and other gatherings/outings. 6. Robert Young's involvement (orisha events, costumes, discussions). 7. Classes - All of them, meeting Jean-Aurel from Haiti was also quite special. 8. Variety of drum cultures. Redman and Lion's energy! 9. Carol La Chapelle's talk / Tommy's Talks 10. Burton's musings 11.  Sylvia's hosting of group and presence.

TODAY, Tuesday, 28 July from 2pm to 3:30pm at University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy of Performing Arts, 3rd Fl. Dance Studio. 

This talk has two impossible objects. the first is actually a process: african american social dance. as process, this object of social dance shimmers and disappears in its very emergence; it is comprised of a sharing of time and energy, musicality and relationship.  an object with no real remnant and no particular place, but an approach to expression made manifest by motion.  the process of black social dance travels, but its contents change even as it comes into being. the second impossible object of this paper is an afrofuture black corporeality: an expansive phenomenological proposition that could allow for black people to be both visually and culturally present even as we are no longer politically maligned for being so. black people travel globally, with and without their social dances, but never without the tangle of racialized presumptions, assumptions, notorieties, and shames that accompany black presence in the contemporary moment and its past.  an impossible future black corporeality might be one that moves outside or beyond these tethering political alignments, even as ethnic and social connections could be encouraged and celebrated.  the object of a progressive afrofuture corporeality becomes impossible because it will never be here, it will always be in the future. it is also a seemingly impossible object because its terms - an unmarked blackness - stagger the imagination of our visually-oriented world, bound by grossly uneven flows of power.

DANCING WHILE BLACK: and then there was fire… Masculinities Re/born May 1-2, 2015 @ BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance 2474 westchester ave, bronx ny

https://www.facebook.com/events/1828909710667619/

"Unity does not require that we be identical to each other.” - Audre Lorde Guest curators Ebony Noelle Golden, Jaamil Kosoko and Nia Love invite us to look at the intersectionality of masculinity, feminism, warrior[ism], [black] art and the assumption that these terms can not occupy the same space. The weekend will feature Collective Conversation facilitated by Seyi Adebanjo, two evenings of performance and Master Classes for the Masses with Maria Bauman, Darrell Jones and Onye Ozuzu.

FRIDAY, MAY 1st Come for the Conversation, Stay for the Show 6:00pm Collective Conversation facilitated by Seyi Adebanjo We live in a world of spectrums, fluidity, and choice. We also live in a world of borders, expectations, and definitions. Now is the time to gather a community of visionaries to imagine what justice looks like for those who dare to embody a full and emboldened expression of humanity. Part discussion and part strategy session, Dancing While Black's collective conversation borrows from the World Cafe process. The conversation, facilitated by Seyi Adebanjo, asks the community of participants to lift up the most pressing questions and tensions surrounding masculinity, sexuality, and gender then imagine a world of increased justice for people who refuse to live in dark corners or the far ends of rigid binaries.

8:00pm Performance featuring work by Brother(hood) Dance!, Raja Feather Kelly and Anthony Rosado $15 / $20 | Click HERE to purchase tickets. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1556008

SATURDAY, MAY 2nd

Come for the Workshops, Stay for the Show

DON'T MISS THIS YEAR'S MASTER CLASSES FOR THE MASSES!

11:00am-1:45pm

The Technology of the Circle: a multi-body performance/dialogue making technique

with Chair of Columbia College Chicago's Dance Department ONYE OZUZU

 2:00pm-4:45pm

I Get Lost…

with Bessie award winner DARRELL JONES

 5:00pm-7:00pm 

Is it About Straight v. Lesbian? Masculinity as part of Womanhood

with former Associate Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women MARIA BAUMAN

Based on Bauman's dance pieces, Women I Know and Attend Me , she is facilitating an experiential discourse on the role of masculinity within womanhood (both cisgender and transgender). In what ways do capitalism, patriarchy, and we as individuals benefit from the United States' brand of coerced, performed femininity? What are the costs and benefits to us as individuals and to institutions, when women embrace masculinity? What role does physicality have in our understanding of masculinity and femininity? What models do we want to cocreate

with communities we work in and with? During this experiential workshop, we will explore these ideas with physical and verbal discourse. No dance experience necessary—only clothes you can move in and a sense of curiosity! People of all genders and gender expressions are

welcome.

$15 for ALL THREE classes!Click HERE to pre-register.

SPACE IS LIMITED.

(Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds) Please contact us at [email protected] if you have questions. 

8:00pm

Performance 

featuring work by Brother(hood) Dance!, Raja Feather Kelly and Anthony Rosado

$15 / $20 | Click HERE to purchase tickets.

This weekend of events is presented in partnership with Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Urban Bush Women and NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

31 March 2015- Port of Spain - New Waves! Institute is pleased to announce the artists selected for the Dancing While Black Performance Lab: Cynthia Oliver, Rashida Bumbray, Mzokuthulu Gasa, Melissa Alexis, Anika Marcelle, Jamie Philbert, Adanna Jones, Orlando Hunter, Nyama McCarthy-Brown, and The Black That I Am. The Performance Lab happens within New Waves! Institute, which celebrates its 5th edition from 22 July to 1 August 2015 at University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy for the Performing Arts in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Co-curated by New Waves! Director, Makeda Thomas and Paloma McGregor, Director of Dancing While Black, and produced through the New Waves! Commission Project, this experimental, multi-performance, interdisciplinary environment will feature dance and performances at the NALIS Amphitheatre in Port of Spain. The 10 selected guests will perform on Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 7pm. Free. For further information on the New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab, please call 321-1430 or email [email protected].

As a choreographer, Rashida Bumbray’s work combines vernacular and folkdance forms—jazz, blues, hoofing, and ring shouts—with magical realism and contemporary cultural and political directives to create intimate spaces of healing and transformation. Bumbray will offer "Run Mary Run”, which seeks to explore the connections between Shango Baptist traditions and rituals with Early Christian, Islamic, and African traditions that are the root of “American” Ring Shouts. The work was presented in 2012 at The Whitney Museum of America Art.

Cynthia Oliver, of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is a professor in the Dance Department at University of Illinois, Urbana and Artistic Director of COCo Dance Theatre. Oliver is building a new project and joins the performance lab to work with a group of men - local dancers and New Waves! participants - to "choreographically unearth ideas of manhood, those that are not merely mimetic external representations of form and style, but deeply rooted, nuanced understandings of the masculine".

Local choreographer, Anika Marcelle offers “#TroubleFree”, in her creative voice that is a  mix of Afro-Caribbean styles (of Jamaica and Trinidad) and contemporary dance (UK) influences and tensions. The piece involves elements of dance and live vocal work. Jamie Philbert, born and “baptized in Trinidadian waters”, will offer “Petit Rivye”. The group work draws from Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones”, working through Haitian folk dance Yanvalou and modern dance movement.

Trinidadian dance scholar, Adanna Jones asks, What happens when a highly co-opted but also profoundly empowering bodily discourse becomes the basis of creating dance? Her work. “Choreographing the Caribbean Social Body”, aims to answer this query by investigating the performative limits of winin’ within the US Diaspora. 

The artists of Braata Theatre Workshop's production of the Karl O’Brian Williams play “The Black That I Am,” deal with a black Caribbean immigrant’s exploration of gender, sexuality, and nationalism.  How is memory and movement effective in ancestral emancipation? asks returning New Waves! participant Orlando Hunter in his work, Mutiny/When will you re-cog-nize. Through performance, the Brooklyn-based Hunter will research bodily “Emancipatory methodologies” which comes out of this New Waves! experience with Tony Hall’s “Jouvay Process”. 

Nyama McCarthy-Brown's work, “Wanted”, has its heart in the mother and son relationship; and how that relationship is viewed in a society that filters its opinions of people through racial constructs. The title speaks to the dual/duel ways black men are wanted  - by their families, and as a criminal object. Professor of Dance at Indiana University, McCarthy-Brown wonders how the dynamics of parenting a black male child shifts in the Caribbean space; where race and class intersect in particular ways that may inform a wider perspective of blackness and mothering.

At its core, the New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab is about how these performances can move with, move through, interact with, and engage with one another. Selected artists are invited to work during the course of New Waves! 2015, from 22 July to 1 August, with New Waves! faculty, guests, participants and the local community. The Institute offers 10 hours of studio lab space for each artist/company at the Academy for Performing Arts. In the spirit of the yard - where dance, drum, chants, speeches, conversations all happen, often simultaneously - the audience is invited to move through the performance, which offers several intimate and interconnected performances spaces within it.  The program is co-curated by New Waves! Director, Makeda Thomas and Paloma McGregor, Director of Dancing While Black, and produced through the New Waves! Commission Project, which offers a presenting platform for dance artists in the Caribbean and throughout its diaspora. 

The New Waves! 2015/Dancing While Black Performance Lab will be presented on Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 7pm at NALIS Amphitheatre at Hart & Abercromby Streets, Port of Spain. The event is free. On Friday, 31 July 2015, all 12 presenting guest artists will participate in a post-performance discussion moderated by Institute Director, Makeda Thomas. 10am – 12pm. University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy for Performing Arts, Dance Studio, 3rd Fl. Open to the public. Free.