Artist Statement
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a performance studies scholar/practitioner specializing in the Black dance aesthetic, my work explores the Black-White binary and the attempted invisibilizing of Black dancing bodies in concert dance. In doing so, my works aim to promote non-stereotypical assumptions about the Black dance aesthetic via political arts activism and movement invention that promotes legitimate cultural pluralism. I position my work in the field of Dance Studies within three specific interdisciplinary and generative frameworks—research-to-performance; practice-based; and practice-led. All of which lend themselves to timely, unsettling, and liminal creations. Driven by my duty as a complete artist/scholar to reflect the times viscerally and candidly, connecting the past with the present via staged representations of history on a loop. My general choreographic practice is rooted in, visibilizing the “blood memories,” “aesthetic of the cool,” and the “get down” qualities evident in Africanist and Black dance aesthetics. These qualities represent the nature of the practice and how dancers of all backgrounds engaging with the practice and performance of these aesthetics, generates new knowledge contributing to the operational significance for this practice.
I create choreography utilizing theatre, hip-hop and postmodern dance, as well as Afro-modern and jazz, allowing me to generate ideas surrounding what “performing Blackness” is and isn’t. The intersectionality of such performances is antiessentialist and is at once exposing and undoing stereotypical assumptions that have historically signified the Black body. This aesthetic approach attempts to undo “race” itself while overtly subverting the subjugating white gaze. The performativity of my work acts as a dialectical image of dance in America and interrogates the cause and effect of its racial/cultural hierarchy. I describe the resistance of my artistry as imperceptible mutabilities resonating within the liminal presentations of Black dancing bodies. At the heart of my art is a call to action: it provokes the audience to think critically and inspires them to be agents of change.
