This conversation emerges from the Afro-Feminist Performance Routes's biennial gatherings at Duke University that have taken place since 2016. Hinging on the work of Lēnablou (Guadeloupe), Rujeko Dumbutshena (Zimbabwe, United States), Sephora Germain (Haiti), Yanique Hume (Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados), Jessi Knight (United States), Halifu Osumare (United States), Luciane Ramos-Silva (Brazil), and Jade Power Sotomayor (Puerto Rico, United States), the focused residency has nurtured embodied dialogues centered on African-derived dance practices and gender, femininity, womanhood, femme, and feminisms. What follows is a scripted simulation of conversations generated in roundtables, workshops, performances, and interviews, as well as around dinner tables and during late-night chats. We've woven together the artists’ statements under two umbrella themes—embodied philosophies and contours of diaspora—in order to highlight the relationship between creative practice and lived experience, between singularity and collective, between precarity and the everyday, between AfroFem and becoming.

Rumba guaguancó, a sub-genre of Afro-Cuban popular dance, has been widely defined as a dance of courtship, characterized as a male pursuit of a woman's sex. The article analyzes alternative meanings of the sub-genre articulated in the pedagogical practices of black women rumba dancers. Insights were gleaned from the author's own dance training in Havana while conducting original ethnographic research between 2009 and 2018. What the author terms “a black feminist choreographic aptitude” taught by rumberas (women rumba dancers) speaks to the pointedly gendered valances of worsening racialized class inequality in contemporary Cuba. Building on Blanco Borelli's theory of “hip(g)nosis,” the article interrogates the racialized and gendered discourses historically reproduced through dominant definitions of rumba, limiting women of African descent to sexual objects. The study argues for increased critical attention to pedagogy as a hermeneutical tool, centering those subjects historically marginalized from the production of knowledge about their bodies.

This essay analyzes Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's 2009 work Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray and its centering of Black women in US American history and contemporary choreographic practices. While the work's revisionist representation of national history could be understood as activist in terms of its desire to activate the spectator, this essay centers what performance might do for Black women performers and their personal practices of artistry and activism over what impulses toward social justice Black women's performances might galvanize in their audiences. Attributing FDWH's transformative potential to its aesthetic combination of postmodernism and sentimentalism and its erotic historiography, I theorize the work as a choreohistory, a mode of cultural production wherein the ordering of movement and the ordering of the past interanimate one another.

This essay explores the intersection of concert dance, cultural memory, Black womanhood, and non-linear spacetime from an Afro-European perspective. Inspired by Black feminist methodologies, the text interweaves performance analysis, historical context, interdisciplinary theory including my own concept of perforMemory, and auto-ethnographic experience gained through participant observation. My writing moves along three lines of inquiry tuned in the key of C: contextualizing, conjuring and contemplating. The article offers a case study of I Step on Air, a contemporary dance piece created by Nigerian-German dancer-choreographer Oxana Chi (Berlin/New York) and dedicated to Ghanian-German poet and activist May Ayim. By including an interlude with the choreographer's own creative writing about the piece, the article also provides the reader with the precious perspective of Oxana Chi on her process. The article is a reflection on/of the resonances between movement, writing, and activism. Let's celebrate the power of Black women to resistDance, step by step, move by move, breath by breath…

“Super Fluid/Super Black: Translations and Teachings in Transembodied Metaphysics” was originally commissioned as a keynote lecture for the 2020 Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CAAD) conference, Fluid Black::Dance Back. It is a hybrid text that centralizes Black Transgender and Nonbinary experiences in a conversation of futurity in African Diasporic spirituality, dance traditions, and performativities. Furthermore, “Super Fluid/Super Black” interrogates beingness through an exploration of astrophysics and global attempts at Black erasure in an attempt to uncover new strategies of collectivizing under dance that dismantle cisheteronormativity at their core.

This article examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos, Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.

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.