Category: Dancing in Blackness, a Memoir

Dancing in Blackness: Halifu Osumare

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In compliance with current health and university guidelines, “Dancing in Blackness: An Academic’s Dance Journey” at Columbia University has been cancelled. Please check back for updates and reschedules.

Halifu Osumare. Ph.D. has been involved with dance and black popular culture internationally for over forty years as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, administrator and scholar. She is Professor Emerita of African American & African Studies at UC Davis and has written two books on global hip-hop: The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2007), in which she coined the phrase “connective marginalities” that gave a cogent reason for the youth culture’s internationalization.

 Her memoir, Dancing in Blackness, with a Foreword written by Brenda Dixon Gottschild, was published by University Press of Florida in 2018, and won the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize for Dance Aesthetics, as well as a 2019 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She has taught dance and lecture-based courses on dance and culture throughout U.S., Europe, Africa, Hawaii, and the Caribbean.

African Voices and Pen & Brush will celebrate National Poetry Month with a tribute to Ntozake Shange.

African Voices and Pen & Brush will celebrate National Poetry Month with a tribute to Ntozake Shange. The event will feature readings from her friend Dr. Halifu Osumare, author of Dancing In Blackness; writer Rashidah Ismaili, Vice President of the Pen And Brush Board; Chanel Dupree, a scriptwriter in development with “Salvage” and several contributors from African Voices special issue honoring Ntozake. The event is free and open to the public. Donations welcome

For Colored Girls

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“In Ntozake Shange’s celebrated feminist choreopoem, through Dec. 8 at the Public, seven women of color, named after and dressed in different hues of the rainbow, explore trauma and resilience through movement and text. Ms. Wailes’s performance is captivating for the ease in which she weaves Camille A. Brown’s choreography with American Sign Language.”

“Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir” wins the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics

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The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce the winner of the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir, by Halifu Osumare, published by the University Press of Florida in 2018.

Dr. Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita in the Department of African American and African Studies (AAS) at University of California, Davis, and was the Director of AAS from 2011-2014. She has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over forty years. With a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and an MA in Dance Ethnology from S.F. State University, she is also a protégé of the late renowned dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham and a Certified Instructor of Dunham Dance Technique.

She has been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of global hip-hop, publishing The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves in 2007 and, and The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop in 2012, after her 2008 Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Ghana, Legon. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on hip-hop, dance, and Katherine Dunham.

The prize was established in 2008 in memory of Selma Jeanne Cohen, and with enormous gratitude for her generous bequest to the ASA. The $1000 prize is awarded every year, for critical articles or books of distinction in dance aesthetics, dance theory, or the history of dance published in English.

Dr. Osumare will be presented with the prize at the 77th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Phoenix October 9-12, 2019. She also will be honored at the annual Dance Scholars Breakfast at the meeting.

Read more here: https://aesthetics-online.org/news/458801/ASA-Announces-2019-Selma-Jeanne-Cohen-Prize-in-Dance-Aesthetics.htm

Afrobeat Radio: Tribute to Ntozake Shange, with Halifu Osumare.

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Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute

My first meeting of Ntozake Shange was the morning of May 17, 2018 when she arrived at the west 57 street recording studio in New York City.   As part of Afrobeat Radio’s media hosting of Halifu Osumare’s Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir book tour, Shange and Osumare were scheduled for an interview with Afrobeat Radio host, Wuyi Jacobs.  Shange, a lifelong friend of Osumare, feature prominently in Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir and was determined to contribute her name and presence in whatever way she could to the successful launch of Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir.

While I was aware that in recent years Shange had been ill, battling to recover more fully from a stroke she had a decade earlier, I was nonetheless surprised with her presence: at once vibrant, bubbling and tenacious, and unabashedly delicate, vulnerable, and uncomfortably revealed.

Like many, I fell in love with Shange’s work during my adolescent years, and as a young adult she gave voice to my confusions and questions and outright frustrations and anger about the world around me.  In her work,  Shange’s work gave me permission, not that I needed permission but it was nice to have it nonetheless, to belong to myself in this world and be fully present in navigating the various paradoxes of the particularly spaces/places which I inhabit and encounter.

On that May 17 morning, I was invited in to a day of paradoxes deliciously laid out on the altar of love for a good friend.  On October 27, 2018, less than six-month later, Shange joined the realm of the ancestor. And, her death, made having witnessed May 17th an even greater honor and a deeper reminder of the role love and true friendship in living meaningful lives.

I invite you to take a listen to Afrobeat Radio’s  Ntozake Shange, Tribute.

 

Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir NYC Tour May 17 – 21, 2018

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May 17, 2018 Interview on WBAI with host, Wuyi Jacobs of AfroBeat Radio.  Halifu Osumare and Ntozake Shange in conversation about Osumare’s Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir and Shange’s Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems

Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
Photo: © Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute

May 17, 2018 Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute Phenomenal Women Series:  Halifu Osumare reading from Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir and Ntozake Shange reading from Wild Beauty, New and Selected Poems, and Osumare and Shange in Conversation!!

May 17, 2018 Halifu Osumare at The JODY Center for Dance Research at Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program Hunter College Dance Program.  Funding was made available for the program for the purchase twenty-five copies of Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir for each student in the graduate dance education program to have their own personal copy!! Halifu Osumare signed each copy!

May 18, 2018 at Gavin Brown Enterprise, Harlem location,  I introduced Ruthlyn Salomons in conversation with Halifu Osumare about Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir

May 21, 2018 at Greenlight Bookstore – Prospect Lefferts Gardens.  Halifu Osumare with Jawole Zollar in conversation about their mutual journey as professional dance artist and social activist and points at which their lives intersected.  Awesome close to the NYC tour Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir!

Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir with Jawole Zollar

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Halifu Osumare’s Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir NYC Book tour came to a close on May 21, 2018 at Greenlight Books.  Halifu Osumare was in conversation with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founder and Chief Visionary of  Urban Bush Women.

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Jawole Zollar listens as Halifu Osumare read from Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir

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Osumare and Zollar engaged in lively critical discussion about the role of dance in resistance and the transformation in social justice work.

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Halifu Osumare, Carol Marie Webster, Jawole Zollar

 

 

Dancing In Blackness, A Memoir – May 17th

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Halifu Osumare speaks with graduate students and dance educators at The JODY -the Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program at Hunter College of the City of New York.