“Africa in Circum-Atlantic Perspective: Feminist Performance Routes”

A conversation in movement with four female dance artists of the African diaspora
April 10 – 13, 2016

Convened by: Thomas F. DeFrantz (Chair, AAAS), Dasha Chapman (Postdoc, AAAS),
Mario LaMothe (Postdoc, Women’s Studies), Ava LaVonne Vinesett (Associate Professor, Dance) and Moarabi Kakabalo (Undergraduate, Engineering)

April 10 – 13, 2016, Duke University will host a four-day conversation in movement with four female dance artists of the African diaspora. Sponsored by Duke’s Africa Initiative, as well as Dance, African and African American Studies, Women’s Studies, and SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, this focused residency will be organized around a series of workshops, a performance, and a roundtable discussion, all open to the public.

“Africa in Circum-Atlantic Perspective: Feminist Performance Routes” aims to catalyze a dialogue around experimentation and feminism as they relate to the diasporic trajectories of African diaspora dance arts and pedagogy. Dance artist-scholars Léna Blou (Guadeloupe), Rujeko Dumbutshena (Zimbabwe/U.S.), Yanique Hume (Jamaica/Barbados), and Jessi Knight (U.S.) will gather at Duke to move together through the entanglement of gender, diasporic memory and decolonizing pedagogies, as a generative web from which they create. They will explore Africa as image and reality, roots and routes, and global black presence as they relate to their dance practices and research.

For further information, please visit http://sites.duke.edu/africainitiative/events/africa-in-circum-atlantic-perspective-feminist-performance-routes/ or contact dasha.chapman@duke.edu.

Please see our Events page for the schedule.