MELISSA LOUIDOR Shange’s work attempts to engage collective recollections that have been passed down through folk tales, dances, and music to recover native memories. These narratives, that were rendered illegible by a constrained formation of knowledge-making, emerge in Shange’s work through language, movement, and physicality; literature is extended beyond the limitations of unilateral expression and becomes a liminal expression that …
Black Dance is Black Life
Dianne McIntyre and Black Performance Art NICOLE HINES “there was a dance that was a black dance/ that’s what it means that black folks cd dance/ it dont mean we got rhythm/…it dont mean just what we do all the time/ it’s how we remember what cannot be said” (Lost in Language & Sound, 68) Dianne McIntyre, dancer, choreographer and founder of the Sounds …
A Daughter’s Cosmography
NADIA MBONDE Artist’s Statement Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s A Daughter’s Geography, “A Daughter’s Cosmography,” is a series of nine pairings of poetry and photography that reflect on concepts of self-care, self-love, ritual, healing, daughtership, mothering and “the politics of the personal.” These ideas, which blur the boundary between theory and politics, reflect my interaction with Audre Lorde’s writings and poetry …