Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance, Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion ( 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings ( 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.

MEDIA

As an artist, thinker, writer, and educator specializing in jazz dance, Melanie centers the West African roots of jazz dance via the historically-informed technique, Neo-Jazz. In an effort to advance recognition and awareness of this form — and all jazz dance styles and techniques, Melanie founded Jazz Is… Dance Project, which operates two primary programs: Jazz Dance Direct, an online resource hub of information about jazz dance, and The Woodshed, an artist retreat program. Her choreography is frequently commissioned by college programs across the U.S. In 2016, Melanie’s choreography for the Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company’s production Women Laughing Alone With Salad was recognized with a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Choreography. With over 25 years of teaching experience in universities, K-12 settings, festivals, and intensives, Melanie is recognized as a leading dance educator. From 2008-2016, she directed the dance program at American University and has held a number of faculty positions throughout the country. Utilizing a three-pronged approach to inquiry — pedagogy, choreography, and research, Melanie’s extensive experience in the field deeply informs her work as a Dance Scholar. With this research-focused mindset, Melanie has acted as a scholar-practitioner for leading dance organizations including, including Lumberyard, Stephen Petronio Company, Dance/NYC, Gibney Dance, and the IABD. As a Dance Dramaturg, Melanie works in a wide variety of dance genres. From 2016-2020, she was the Dramaturg / Audience Educator at Lumberyard, making her the only full-time institutional dramaturg for dance in the USA, and she is honored to be among the dramaturgs affiliated with Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center. Other dramaturgy collaborations include: Susan Marshall & Company, Raja Feather Kelly, Kimberly Bartosik/daela, Alice Sheppard/Kinetic Light, Maria Bauman-Morales/MBDance, Ephrat Asherie Dance, and Helen Simoneau Danse. Melanie holds a BA in dance from Western Michigan University, an MA in Dance, and a Graduate Certificate in Secondary Teaching from American University, and movement analysis certification from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. Currently, Melanie serves as an Associate Curator at Jacob’s Pillow.

MEDIA:

• • Pillow Voices: The Roots of Jazz:  : 

  • Preserving the Jazz Dance Heritage – Melanie George and “JAZZ IS…DANCE PROJECT” 

  • act re act podcast: Conversation with Melanie George

  • Teaching Jazz Dance with Melanie George 

   

  • https://www.melaniegeorge.org/

I am a dancer, writer, wanderer, wonderer, curious about people who use art to collaborate in healing and recreating worlds. At UWB, I teach courses in cultural politics, self-care, dance and performance art as research practice. I collaborate with Professor Anida Yoeu Ali to produce campus and regional arts events through the IAS research group Critical Acts: Socially Engaged Performance, including our Visiting Artist Residency, Alive Performance Festival and Imagine Student Showcase. My book Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics mixes dance ethnography and oral history to tell stories of streetdances created by youth living in Funk and Disco era California, whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. I invented the word ‘kinethic’ to describe how their collective movement practices reorient dancers toward other ways of sensing, being and belonging in ethical relation. Forthcoming with the international Dance Studies Association’s Studies in Dance Series (University of Michigan Press), the book has received support from National Endowment of Humanities, Simpson Center for Humanities, Royalty Research Fund and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. I also collaborate artistically with Milvia Pacheco Salvatierra, Executive Director of Movimiento AfroLatino Seattle. Our current project, Little Brown Language, researches submerged histories of resistance to colonial encounter in Venezuela and the Philippines, translated as dance-incantations. We have performed for On The Boards, Wing Luke Museum and 2022 Reflections Dance Festival. From 2002-2008 I directed DREAM, an Oakland, California-based streetdance company which toured nationally. Our piece Full Circle, a collaboration with hip hop dancer and AfroCuban folklorist José Francisco Barroso, was nominated for the Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award in Choreography. I have been a New York City Hip Hop Theater Festival Future Aesthetics Artist and received funding from Creative Work Fund, Rennie Harris PureMovement, East Bay Community Foundation and Zellerbach Foundation. My work is deeply informed by three-decades study of African Diaspora dances in the US, Cuba, Brazil and Europe, and underground dancing in clubs and parties of 1990s Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

MEDIA

• Naomi Macalalad Bragin: Black Power of Hip Hop Dance, On Kinesthetic Politics
• Little Brown Language
•  “Genre et Sexualité en Hip Hop et le Danse Waack.”
• “Danscendances de WAACK Table-Ronde.”
• “The Intimate Assembly.”
• “Shot and Captured: Streetdance from Hood to Screen.”

https://www.naomibragin.com/

Moncell Durden was a member of Brooklyn hip hop pioneering group Mop-Top and spent 10 years performing with Philadelphia Hip Hop company Rennie Harris Puremovement. A dancer/educator, ethnochoreologist, documentarian, embodied historian, author and Associate Professor of practice at the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Moncell specializes in pedagogical practices that prove cultural and historical context in what he calls the morphology of Afro-kinetic memory. Moncell teaches practical and theoretical classes in the U.S. and abroad; an expert in locking, house, hip-hop, authentic jazz, and American and European social dances from 1800 to the present. His book Beginning Hip Hop Dance was published by Human Kinetics, other articles appear in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches, the Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America, Rooted Jazz Dance, and the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance. He has consulted on the Baz Luhrmann film “Elvis”, Disney+ “The World According to Jeff Goldblum,” TV show “The Porter” and for Camille Brown’s “Mr, Tol E. RAncE,” & TED ED “The History of African American Social Dance,” Denzel Washington film “Ma Rainey” and new Broadway production “The Hippest Trip.” Moncell also appears in a number of documentaries, Uprooted: A story of the journey of jazz dance, WACO “The Evolution of African Dance,” and “Why Do We Dance” produced by sky studios in the U.K. to name a few. His own documentary “Everything Remains Raw: A Historical Perspective of Hip Hop Dance, is available on Youtube. Moncell is currently working on a new textbook covering African American Social Dance.

MEDIA:

• Inside Dance| Bates Dance Festival: Moncell Durden

Gianina K.L. Strother has an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago and a B.S. in Chemistry from Howard University. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds professional certificates in Women’s Studies, Diversity and Inclusion, Nonprofit Executive Leadership, and Project Leadership from the University of Maryland, Cornell University, and Indiana University-Purdue University. Her research interests include Black Feminism, Black Studies, Performance Studies, Critical Race Theory, Dance Studies, and Contemporary African American Theatre.  Since 2019, she has served as an Instructor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland where she has taught “Black Theatre & Performance,” “Theory and Performance: Black Women Playwrights,” “Introduction to Dance: Dances of the African Diaspora,” and “Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies.” Her scholarly publications have appeared in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and the Dance Research Journal and she is a two-time grant recipient of the International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research. Strother has led projects focused on social justice at the University of Ghana, Accra, and the University of Maryland. She has served as an Educational Adviser for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation in Leesburg, Virginia, and has worked as a Museum Educator and Docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. As an artist, Strother also has worked as a Dramaturg and Voice Actor. She was a Playwright/Performer for The Kennedy Center 15th Annual Stage-to-Play New Play Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and performed as a dancer with the Kankouran West African Dance Community class and the Coyaba Theatre Repertory. Her work has been exhibited and performed at Chicago’s Raw Gallery and Links Hall in Chicago, Illinois. In fall 2020, she founded Jasiri Consulting, which offers online tutoring, college planning, life coaching, and online courses focused on race and popular culture. She is a native of Detroit and a proud graduate of Cass Technical High School.

MEDIA: 

• Sonic Introduction