Afro-Feminist Performance Routes is a focused residency with a cohort of dancer-scholars who continue urgent embodied dialogues around African diaspora dance practices and gender, femininity, womanhood, femme, and feminisms.
SCHEDULE 2022
**all workshops in the Rubenstein Arts Center**
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 16th
5:15 – 6:30pm | RAC 224
Rujeko Dumbutshena, Zimbabwean dance
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 17
8:30 – 9:45am | RAC 224
LenaBlou, Techni’ka contemporary technique, Guadeloupe
12:00 – 1:30pm | RAC 124
Maya Berry, Rumba Improvisation Lab
5:15 – 6:30pm | RAC 224
Yanique Hume, Afro-Caribbean sacred dances
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 18
2:30 – 3:30pm | VON DER HEYDEN THEATER
AfroFem: An Embodied Dialogue
Maya Berry, Lena Blou, Rujeko Dumbutshena, Yanique Hume, Jade Power Sotomayor
6:30pm – 7:00pm | VIRTUAL PRESENTATION
Halifu Osumare, “Katherine Dunham as Political Dance Radical”
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 19
2:00 – 2:30pm | VIRTUAL PRESENTATION
Luciane Ramos Silva, “Acogny technique – south south decolonizing dance syllabus connections”
6:15 – 7:30 PM | RAC 224
Jade Power-Sotomayor, Melanie Maldonado, Sarah Bruno, “Offerings from Bomba’s Batey: Rhythm, History, Diaspora”
8:30pm | VON DER HEYDEN THEATER
Lena Blou performance
AfroFem COHORT
Maya J. Berry, Ph.D. (Cuba/US) is a dancer and anthropologist by training whose research on Black popular performance and politics in Havana, Cuba appears in Afro-Hispanic Review, Black Diaspora Review, Cultural Anthropology, and Cuban Studies. She is Assistant Professor of African diaspora studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and currently serves on the executive board of the Association of Black Anthropologists and the editorial board of Feminist Anthropology journal.
Lena Blou, Ph.D. (Guadeloupe) is an avant-garde dance artist who created “Techni’ka”, a contemporary teaching technique based on Guadeloupe’s Gwoka rhythms and dances. She is the founder of the Center for Dance and Choreographic Studies and the Compagnie Trilogie LenaBlou and the Larel Bigidi’Art, combining training, creation and research.
Rujeko Dumbutshena(Zimbabwe/US) is a dancer, choreographer and teacher of what she terms “neo traditional” Zimbabwean dance technique. She teaches and performs throughout the U.S. She received her MFA from the University of New Mexico, and is Assistant Professor of Dance and University of Florida.
Sephora Germaine (Haiti) is one of the very few leading female contemporary Haitian dancers with an international performing career. She is a soloist of Jeanguy Saintus’ Ayikodans (Haiti). She also has a local commitment to teaching dance and yoga to youth in Port-au-Prince.
Yanique Hume, Ph.D. (Jamaica/Cuba/Barbados) is Associate Professor of Caribbean Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. She is also President of KOSANBA (the Scholarly Association for the Study of Vodou), and a professional dancer/choreographer who works in Afro-Caribbean sacred forms.
Jade Power Sotomayor (Puerto Rico/US) is Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at UC-San Diego. Her work engages Latinx performance in relation to the politics of race, ethnicity, remembering and community. Power Sotomayor researches, teaches, and performs Bomba.
Halifu Osumare (USA) is Professor Emerita in the Department of African American and African Studies (AAS) at the University of California, Davis. Author 6 has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over forty years. With a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, she is also a protégé of the late renowned dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham and a Certified Instructor of Dunham Dance Technique.
Luciane Ramos Silva, Ph.D. (Brazil) is a dancer, choreographer, educator, anthropologist, and cultural organizer based in Sao Paolo, Brazil, who works in a mode she calls “Diaspora Body” that brings West African and Contemporary Brazilian movement modes in conversation. Ramos Silva also edits one of Brazil’s only Black culture publications, O Menelick2Ato.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
Maya J. Berry and Tina Vasquez
A Rumbera Improvisation Lab: Workshop participants will be led through a process of learning, playing with, and reflecting upon the foundational postures and key strategies entailed in Afro-Cuban rumba improvisation. Structured improvisation exercises in pairs centering rumbera-inspired somatic skills and decision-making aim to generate a deeper awareness of Afro-Cuban popular dance as a tool to creatively negotiate intersecting power dynamics, while opening new possibilities for relationality in movement more broadly.
