“We as dancers really need to own our own stories and begin to tell our own stories” Halifu Osumare, August 3, 2020. Camille A. Brown & Dancers’ “Social Dance for Social Distance”
Tag: Dance
“Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir” wins the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics
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 Critical Joy (Third-Wednesday) Series
Join the final
AfroBeat Radio Critical Joy (Third-Wednesday) Series of 2018
December 19, 2018
(Dance Class – 7:00 – 8:30/ CJ Workshop – 8:30 – 10:00/Music & Dance – 10:00 – Midnight)
Location: Brooklyn Commons, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
A Bit of Dance…Education: Camille A Brown
CADD – 2018 Dance Black Joy: Global Affirmation and Defiance
Colloquium on African Diaspora Dance, February 2018
Honored to have been a part of this amazing gathering!! Proud to have delivered my workshop Ecstatic Reasoning -blackness protracted: Migration and Constructed Identities.
https://www.cadd-online.org/2018-conference.html
Looking forward to 2020
Workshop Today! Critical Joy/Ecstatic Reasoning (CJ/ER)
September 19, 2018 Critical Joy/Ecstatic Reasoning (CJ/ER) – Blackness Protracted Workshop
AfroBeat Radio at BROOKLYN COMMONS, 388 ATLANTIC AVENUE, BETWEEN BOND & HOYT STREETS, BROOKLYN, NY 11217
REGISTER at the door. More Information: HERE
Though embodied practices that center on African Diasporic (Black) body technologies of reasoning in and through ecstatic joy, CJ/ER workshop is an exploration and examination of critical joy that is embodied and thereby potentially resurrective. In CJ/ER workshop the body’s abilities are directed to manufacture (real and/or imagined) spaces/place for reconstruction, reconfiguration, and realignment of self-to-self, self-to-community, and self-to-divine. CJ/ER workshop participants will be guided through techniques and experience processes for igniting Critical Joy/Ecstatic Reasoning into daily life, and discovery and re/imagine inner embodied resources for navigating through and making sense of life in a problematic world.
When: 8:30 – 10:00 pm Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Where: BROOKLYN COMMONS, 388 ATLANTIC AVENUE, BETWEEN BOND & HOYT STREETS, NYC 11217
REGISTER at the door. More information HERE
Reload Moment: The Making of Carmen Montana
Some years ago (no need to mention how many), I began a journey with the explicit translation of text to movement/dance. If I am being honest, my choreographic process, for as far back as I can remember, always began with the translation of the images in my head and/or sensations in my body to text. I would then, through numerous studio sessions, translate the text to movement/dance and in the process sculpt out the essence of a story. It is for this reason, I have journal loads of choreo-text, some became fully realized dance works, while others await their dance life.
My collaboration with Joanne Kilgour Dowdy began in the latter years of the 1990s when we were both based at Georgia State University. In that first collaboration we translated her PhD dissertation to dance. During subsequent years we collaborated on other projects, one of which was Carmen Montana: a story of literacy on the move. Base on the true story of an adult literacy student’s struggle to gain literacy and self actualize, the making of Carmen Montana took Dowdy and I on our own powerful journey. On this video the then Dr. Dowdy, now Professor of Literacy Studies School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University, Ohio, interviews me about the rehearsal process of Carmen Montana: a story of literacy on the move.
Michaela DePrince
My interest is in the lives and life stories of African Diaspora women, with particular attention to expressions/articulations of identity and belonging. Michaela DePrince is an extraordinary artist and survivor of war. Please share your thoughts on the May 2017 interview.
Dance/Rest-in-Peace Baba Chuck
http://www.heraldsun.com/news/local/community/durham-news/article150488137.html
Notes from the Athens – 2015 SDHS/CORD Conference/Cut & Paste: Advocacy in the Age of Austerity
Workshop: Isadora Duncan’s Study of Ancient Greek Art, Mythology, and Philosophy Informed Her Work
This workshop was exquisitely delivered by Lori Belilove; it was detailed packed, drawing heavily on the body knowledge of Isadora Duncan’s methodology. Emi Yagistita (right), guest demonstrator and Belilove’s student, is captured in the spirit of Isadora Duncan.
Above, physicist Panagiotis Pantidos takes the plunge, participating in his first ever somatic workshop experience, Into the Wind: Imagining Landscapes of Renewal delivered by Jessica Fogel.
Break-in Point: Somatic Narratives, the convergence of arts and science in the transformation of temporal communities at the 2015 SDHS/CORD delivered by Jiannis Pachos, Panagiotis Pantidos, and Carol Marie Webster. See excerpt of Break-in’ Point video below.
