Friday March 19th: Clear, Build, Release: A Black Feminist Movement Lab

The Yale Dance Lab is pleased to cosponsor the upcoming movement lab organized by Aimee Meredith Cox, Associate Professor, Departments of Anthropology and African American Studies. 

Clear, Build, Release: A Black Feminist Movement Lab

Limbs slice across, clearing away the dank residue of grief.  Heart rates climb, building an ecstatic fire of action.  Torsos arch and collapse into stillness, releasing the song of a possible future.  This collaborative workshop draws on the twin genealogies of Black feminist thought and diasporic dance traditions to think move from the abstract Black body to the prism of Black embodiments. Join us as we experiment with movement, gesture, and sensation as practical epistemologies of Black freedom.  Come ready to play.

Please join Aimee Meredith Cox, Savannah Shange, and Jasmine Johnson on Friday March 19th from 4-6PM EST. All are welcome. No dance experience required.

Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/clear-build-release-a-black-feminist-movement-lab-tickets-141163713467 Our limited Zoom space is quickly filling up!

Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and movement artist. She is currently an associate professor in the Anthropology and African American Studies Departments at Yale University. Her first book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015) has won several awards. She is currently working on a multi-sited ethnographic project called “Living Past Slow Death” as well as a book and workshop series on performance ethnographic praxis.

Jasmine E. Johnson is a writer, teacher, and dancer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Her first book project, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, is a transnational ethnography on the industry of West African dance. Her work has been published by The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Dance Research Journal, Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Theater Survey, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Aster(ix), and elsewhere.

Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique. Savannah has been a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellow, and a Point Scholar. Her first book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is a winner of the Bateson Book Prize awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Sponsored by: The Embodied Research Collective, Theater and Performance Studies, and The Yale Dance Lab