Welcome

This 7-day event will combine scholarly presentations, creative workshops, and performances on African diaspora dance arts. The goal is to facilitate cross-cultural conversations between the artists, scholars, traditional and spiritual practitioners.

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The conference will explore how African diaspora dance (spiritual and traditional) has served as a tool of agency and emancipation against capitalistic ascriptions, oppression, and anti-Black racism in American contexts. Participants are encouraged to investigate how African diaspora dances are practiced to develop solidarity, consciousness and identification between people who might otherwise be regionally, culturally, or spiritually separated, but similar.

We invite researchers, artists and practitioners who examine any aspect of the repression, re-imagination, or celebration of African diaspora artistic, cultural, or spiritual practices to submit a proposal for a scholarly presentation, dance workshop or performance.

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We especially welcome individual papers, full panels, and dance/interdisciplinary workshops. Below are possible topics for exploration, but we encourage you to use your imagination on the general theme of the conference:

● Religious/spiritual practices as resistance to state oppression and denigration of African diaspora cultures and peoples.

● Responses of the African diasporic artistic experience to globalization and capitalism

● Dance forms influenced by religious/spiritual practices -Rumba, Bomba, Samba Afro, movements of the Orixá/Oricha/Orisha/Orisa, etc.

● Africana dance arts with its diversity of forms, media, and themes

● The relationship between African diaspora dance cultural practices and spiritual practices

● The ways in which presenters, media and exhibitions have shaped our understanding of Africana artistic dance and cultural practices

● African diaspora performative practices as a means of constructing identity

● The roles of fashion and the body as instruments of affirmation and/or resistance

● Dance contributions to political protests

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Additional information:

-proposals for individual academic and creative papers and readings (lasting 15­-20 minutes)

-full panels or round-table discussions (3­-4 participants, lasting 60 minutes)

-dance workshops (lasting 55 minutes)

-dance performances (less than 13 minutes)

Selected presenters will be notified by September 15, 2023.

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Organized by:

Tamara Williams, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Associate Professor, Department of Dance

UNC Charlotte

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Rosangela Silvestre, The Silvestre Cultural Association

Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

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Maxine Montilus, MV Dance Project