Description:

Friday, February 28 – Saturday, March 1
Wirtz Chicago - Abbott Hall | 710 N Lakeshore Drive

Registration required; register here

A meeting of the multi-year SLIPPAGE project Black Dance and Geographies of Freedom convened by SLIPPAGE artistic director Thomas F. DeFrantz and supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, gathers advanced thought-in-motion around Black Social Dance practices, to create an organizational scaffolding that can elaborate thinking and moving in narratives of liberation.

Embodied researchers, all specialists in Black Dance and Black social formations, gather to imagine relevant research methods that underscore the theoretical and experiential complexity of movements we call Black Social Dance.

Thomas F. DeFrantz: Founder Slippage Lab, Northwestern University
Jamal “Litebulb” Oliver: Chicago Footwork
Danielle Roper: University of Chicago 
E. Moncell Durden: University of Southern California 
Meida McNeal: Honey Pot Performance 
Wills Glasspiegel: Filmmaker
Ayo Walker: Columbia College Chicago 
Aaliyah Christina: Chicago Dance, Writer, Curator 
Michael Davis: Dancer, Choreographer
Jenn Freeman: Po ‘ Chop 

This gathering wants to draw a theoretical landscape for understanding how black social dance operates as a lever for people in Chicago. Starting with social dance as the basis for performance, what if we think about social dance as a way of setting an agenda or a template that figures the inherent black time in thought and practice? We are thinking about social dance in Chicago as a life-organizing , community-building practice, which opens a way of theorizing black social dance as relational, discursive, and embodied. It allows us to frame social dance as a method of inquiry into Black life—how people gather, resist, and exist in moments that do not seek to be captured or valorized but instead stand as repertoires body knowledge.