IMPROVISING WHILE BLACK
I call my practice Improvising While Black (aka IWB) and it was birthed in 2012 when I was a graduate student working on my MFA thesis in Dramatic Arts/Choreography at UC Davis. IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project and dance improvisation experiment that grew out of investigating my dance practice in relation to a specific incident where I was racially profiled while driving while black (DWB) and subsequently incarcerated in San Francisco, California. My experience of being Black in anti-Black world while simultaneously relinquishing the assumption of Blackness as an identity is a central inquiry in my work. The work lives in the question of Blackness. I strive to decenter humans and embrace earth, wind, fire, water, plant life, marine mammal life, and cosmic life. My work embodies my research. I explore vocal and dance improvisation, (de)composing dance, breath choreographies, and pedagogies of embodied liberation. IWB is currently engaged with multiple projects such as performances, workshops, garden projects, ocean voyages and gatherings with humans, non humans and earthlings around the globe.
