Joy, Rhythm, & Deliverance: American Dance’s Black Diasporic Roots
Talk-Workshop (dress to move and bring something to write with/on)
Talk: Danced to Deliverance: Black Structures of Form Animating Dance by Thomas F. DeFrantz
This talking dance explores the structure of Black Faith as foundational to many forms of dance in the 21st century. Selected examples from historical spiritual dancing, contemporary ballet, and house dancing suggest moving beyond linear space and time as methods to recognize American dance in its many diasporas.
Thomas F. DeFrantz directs the SLIPPAGE laboratory, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Before joining Northwestern, he was on faculty at MIT and Duke University, with side jaunts teaching at Yale, Stanford, Hampshire College, and NYU. Thomas believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Thomas also writes books about dance and theater, including the Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Additionally, he acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.
Workshop: The New Orleans Original BuckShop Workshop by Michelle N. Gibson
Rooted in New Orleans' unique spiritual and cultural traditions, The New Orleans Original BuckShop workshop provides not just a window but a doorway into practices that have sustained communities through joy, rhythm, and resilience. An exploration of the unifying power of the Black Church and Black syncretic practices, the workshop aims to share the essence of Black New Orleans culture in a format that benefits every participant. These spiritual and communal elements have historically knitted together a potentially fragmented Black community, nourishing a collective identity and fostering resilience through shared rituals and beliefs. Through her Second Line Aesthetic, Michelle N. Gibson's workshop focuses on improvised movement, interpretation, defined footwork, full body articulation, authentic self, and the embrace of communal ritual. With hips leading the torso and feet, legs bent at the knees, and steps that strut, Gibson invites participants to share lived experiences, embodied spiritual unification, harmony, rolling on the same rhythms together, and moving forward as a way to heal the world.
Michelle N. Gibson is a Mother, Choreographer, Cultural Ambassador, Curator, Professor, Performing Artist, and Spiritualist. She received her BFA in Dance from Tulane University and her MFA from Hollins University in collaboration with the American Dance Festival at Duke University. Currently, Gibson is as a Professor of Practice in Dance at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and recently completed her 14th year on faculty with the American Dance Festival’s Pre-Professional Intensive at Duke University. A consummate storyteller, employing body and mind to build a bridge between the culture and academia, but most importantly, humanity. On stage and in the classroom, Gibson intricately intertwines Black African American dance traditions, choreography, and associated scholarship linking the vibrant heritage of New Orleans through the Caribbean to the vast expanses of Africa, evoking the social, political, economic, and spiritual understandings central to building bonds within and across cultures. This journey, steeped in both tradition and innovation, encapsulates Gibson’s unwavering commitment to heal the world through the culture.
About the American Dancing Bodies Symposium
In 2012 a curricular revolution took place at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago recognizing the American dancing body as a rich fusion of techniques originating in Africa, Europe and the United States. More than a decade since this transformation at the Dance Center, the impact locally and nationally has been profound. The 2-day American Dancing Bodies Symposium invites dance educators, enthusiasts, practitioners, scholars, and students to explore together the intersectionality of present-day dance: what's now and what's next in dance, on the stage, in the studio, and in the classroom?
