![]() At one level, their performance is radical because, rather than privileging themselves, each employs a communal methodology centering the community with which they engage. Marjani’s nomenclature of “Radical Black Performance” best captures the nature of their collective interrogation of the Black experience, past, present, and futuristically. Here, I explore their common aesthetic and metaphysical threads, while exposing their unique performative approaches.Įach artist is engaged in uncompromising revolutionary performance work in the Black tradition. These three dance artists produce process-oriented performance in relation to their defined communities. Each of us are products of our time and generation. Millennials Marjani Fortè-Saunders in Pasadena, Calif., and Jennifer Harge in Detroit approach social activism through dance utilizing internal probing, lodged in collective Black memory. Amara Tabor-Smith, also from the Bay Area but of Generation X, pushed our work further with an increased understanding of African spirituality. I am a baby boomer from the activist San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, who helped initiate dance as a medium of social change in the revolutionary late-1960s, a generation that turned to Africa as a distinguishing element in our Black dance forms during our era’s Black Arts Movement. I cannot be the objective authority on dance and Black choreographers I must acknowledge my dancing voice in an activist lineage, which includes these three probing dance artists as current incarnations of a collective embodied liberation movement.Įach of us represents a nexus on the historical lineage of Black dancing bodies seeking personal freedom while choreographing collective social change. I initiate this article on three phenomenal Black women dance artists by situating the four of us in a historical continuum of American dance and “shifting paradigms” in the United States. “There is something about this time,” dance artist Marjani Fortè-Saunders asserts, that harkens to the past, while simultaneously pointing us toward the future. ![]() This could be defined as Social Change it is most certainly a shifting paradigm. There is something about this time, about this nowness that drives me it ignites me a Pan-African pursuit of Liberation. Marjani Fortè-Saunders in Memoirs of a…Unicorn. ![]()
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