Free panel discussion on Hip Hop, scholarship, and higher education.
Dr. Ayo Walker is a Performance Studies Practitioner, Choreographer, and Dance and African American Studies Educator. As an anti-racist educator, her praxis is committed to substantiating the techniques, vernaculars, and genealogies and embodiment of historically marginalized and othered dance aesthetics. Her work is rooted in visibilizing the “blood memories,” “aesthetic of the cool,” and the “get down” qualities evident in Africanist and Black dance aesthetics. Employing social justice choreography representative of anti-essentialist movement that is at once exposing and undoing stereotypical assumptions historically signifying the Black body politic, her works challenge what performing Blackness is and isn’t.
B-Long: Honoring and Examining Lineage, Legacy, and Belonging in Hip Hop and Street Dance Culture celebrates ten years of the B-Series Festival with workshops, cyphers, panels, screenings, battles, and jams that unite academic scholars, commercial practitioners, and community innovators.
The presentation of the B-Series 10th Anniversary is made possible in part by support from Alphawood Foundation, Chicago Arts Recovery Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, Honey Pot Performance's The Chicago Black Social Culture Map, the Illinois Arts Council, and Red Bull.
The presentation of 7NMS|PROPHET Wkshp: PILLARS was made possible in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
This project is partially supported by a grant from the Office of Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Columbia College Chicago.
