This Keynote offers a brief overview of an artistic and activist editorial project based in São Paulo City, the magazine O Menelick 2° Ato, as well as presents a portrait of some Black contemporary women artists, some of them interdisciplinary, and articulates modes of interrogating political and symbolic violence and subjugation from Brazilian colonially, creating an artistic presence rooted in the search for self-determination, autonomy, and modes of existence ignited by Black diasporas’ ways of self-writing. Their creative work also disrupts hegemonic epistemologies and calls us to look at what is going on in the Black South America.

This autoethnography explores a dance scholar's previous choreographic trajectory, positioning the author's career within the sixties and seventies Black Arts Movement for social change. I explore several iterations of my dance lecture-demonstration in particular, which was produced over two decades and three continents, demonstrating how temporal and spatial shifts affect the content and context of a choreographic work. Additionally, I explore my shift into arts producing through my national dance initiative that helped define the work of eighties Black choreographers in the postmodern dance movement. The result is a consideration of how being Black, female, and a dancer provides a particular sociohistorical lens.

Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation began with Dr. Shamell Bell's dream, a clear vision of people around the world heeding a call, at the same time, to the same rhythm, in a collective resonance. It has grown into a conversation, a community, a journey, and a call to action. This Radical Embodied Dialogue was created to honor Black dance artists and their legacies. As part of the Street Dance Activism Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation twenty-eight-day collective healing project, we invited Marlies Yearby and Dianne McIntyre to share their stories and their shared histories. The pandemic, coupled with use of technology, opened up and provided alternative methods to host a gathering and listen to their experiences that have too often been excluded from dance history texts. This resulting documentation of some of the work of these artists restores the significance of their work to American dance history.

In this article, I argue that the spectacle of American football, and the performance practices of HBCU dance lines birthed within it and seasoned in queer nightclubs, propelled Black “femme-inintiy” from the sidelines to the center of choreographic and discursive practices of Black liberation. I wed queer Black feminism with Yoruba cosmology to analyze three protests instigated during three NFL events in 2016: Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance, the direct actions of Black Lives Matter activists at the Super Bowl, and Assata's Daughters’ protest at the NFL Draft. Ultimately, I theorize the generative potential of spectacle and uplift the organizing and labor of queer Black femmes and gender nonconforming people in the Movement 4 Black Lives.