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Narr
ative
s in

LEYE
b o d i e d P ractices AK IN
Em
ESOLA
D
B YA
I T ED
ED
 Narratives in Black British Dance

“This is a timely, even crucial, anthology—a contribution to the emergent canon

of scholarly work revealing Africanist cultural streams which, though ‘invisibilized’
in a European post-colonial world, are alive and well, despite systemic racism and
xenophobic exclusionism. Narratives in Black British Dance is a rich and varied
category and home base to embodied scholarship, performance, choreography
and research by a cadre of gifted practitioners. It has a history. It has a present and
a presence. It deserves this attention.”
—Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Professor Emerita of Dance Studies, Temple
University, USA

“An important treaty to the significance of dance community challenging domi-

nant stereotypes and structures that reproduce social inequalities, this book makes
a vital and exciting contribution to the dance field, mapping humanizing possibili-
ties dance can offer the 21st century.”
—Doug Risner, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Journal of Dance Education and
Associate Editor of Research in Dance Education

“This informative book is not just for scholarly research, but highlights the impor-
tance of artist discovery, journey development, and the understanding and practice
of dance-art forms in Britain. Journeys we have witnessed in each other.”
—Jackie Guy, MBE, CD, Teacher and Choreographer

“An urgent offering to the expanding field of Dance Studies! Exploring a range of
artistic practices from a variety of research perspectives, this volume affirms the
deep histories of the embodied arts in Black Britain. These potent essays demon-
strate that the moving body makes meaning through experience. A vibrant anima-
tion of the narrative turn of dance scholarship, this book is required reading for
everyone in dance and cultural studies.”
—Thomas F. DeFrantz, Founding Director of the Collegium
for African Diaspora Dance
 Adesola Akinleye
Editor

Narratives in Black
British Dance
Embodied Practices
Editor
Adesola Akinleye
Middlesex University
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-70313-8    ISBN 978-3-319-70314-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70314-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961566

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Image Source Plus / Alamy Stock Photo

Cover Design: Humanities / Performing Arts

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To all the dancers who have often been nameless or remain nameless: dancers
who have contributed to the dance community in Britain and world-wide
through their love, enthusiasm and belief in movement for expression, be they
on the dance floor, in the dance studio, on the stage, in the school gym or
church hall, or in the streets.
Thank you
This book was seeded by the excitement and conversations initiated by the
first Re:Generations Conference in UK in 2010. Special thanks to the that
first conference’s organising team Jeannette Bain-Burnett & Judith
Palmer, (ADAD), Deborah Baddoo MBE (State of Emergency
productions), Anne Hogan, Lucy Richardson & Jane Turner (London
Metropolitan University), and Beverly Glean (Irie! dance theatre) for their
vision in collaborating to organise the conference. Thank you to Mercy
Nabirye and One Dance UK for their continued support of the project as
the book developed over the subsequent years.
 Forewords

Black Britishness is so often contextualised through either an African or a

North American lens, asking us to locate Blackness in Britain as “of another
place”; or implying ownership of emotions and histories that originate out-
side the British experience. Despite the vibrancy of African and North
American Blackness, Britain adds its own distinctive threads of colour to
the fabric of dance-art. Threads that can contribute beyond its shores to con-
textualise the spaces and silences its quiet presence have left. These Forewords
from US and Nigerian artist-scholars salute diasporic connectedness while
acknowledging the importance of recognising the uniqueness of each other’s
stories – A. Akinleye

Foreword by Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz

Many researchers of African descent understand that to write about Black
performance is to value the possibilities of Black people’s creativity and
lives. For us, the act of narrating performance and researching histories of
dance is an act of affirmation and of group communion; an opportunity to
extend shared pleasures and critiques beyond the moments of our encoun-
ters in theatres, at dance halls, in studios, or at feasts and family gatherings.
Scholarship in this area serves to stabilise the possibilities of the live experi-
ence: to expand historical contexts and explain connections among people
and their histories; to validate the theoretical assumptions already at play
in the performance; and to share stories from the dance floor about where
and when we entered.

vii
viii FOREWORDS

Too often in the past, we were not allowed the opportunity to

c­ ritically celebrate our achievements as embodied artists. For too many
researchers, “Black” performance arrived as a dynamic cipher, an
approach to action that demonstrated an ‘otherness’ far from a main-
stream of art. In identifying its particularities, researchers constructed
an impossible alterity for Black performance as a capacious space with-
out logical boundary or intentionality. Black dance might be anything
done by Black people in any circumstance, and it needn’t have been
artistic or engaged in any social ambition. Dozens of essays took on
the unreasonable task of trying to define Black dance practice, as
though one might be able to define “music” or “art” in a useful and
coherent manner. Getting caught up in the losing game of defining
creative behaviour stalled the study of Black dance.
NOW we do better, and this volume offers crucial evidence of a vibrant
field in formation. Here, we read about Black dance practices and their
effects in the world from people who are committed to their recovery,
recitation, and well-being. Surely, it matters that the researchers telling the
stories here care about social possibilities for the people whose dances they
narrate. Here, more than in most scholarly accounts of Black dance, the
authors value the potentials of personal revelation, and its place in research
about Black people. In this, we encounter a communication of an experi-
ence of dance; the translation of action into narrative. In editing the book,
Akinleye acknowledges that much is lost in this violent translation from
dance to manuscript; the dance leaves its place in time and space to become
fixed as figures on a page or screen. But the process of translation is
approached with care and consideration, with an abiding respect and
desire to do right by dancing itself. This is an urgent goal approached by
the present volume.
But where is the Black British? Is it a place, bound to the islands and
colonies that make up Great Britain? Does it exist in time or space, or,
more rightly, as an experience of the imagination endured by some but
not all? When does it come into being, and what might be gained by call-
ing it forth? Is it conceived as an alternative to some sort of White
Britishness? These speculative questions drive the need for engaged
research in this important area. Of course, Black British life is best con-
sidered on its own terms, without an inevitable reference to Whiteness or
the disavowal of, say, a lack of Black dancers being cast by the Royal
 FOREWORDS
   ix

Ballet. Black British dance deserves explication on its own terms, not as
the leftovers from a historical recounting of White trends in dance-
making. The essays in this volume demonstrate that Europe and its com-
plex colonial histories will always be present, to some extent, in any
articulation of life in Britain, and yet Black British lives demand their own
tellings and imaginings according to terms that centre their own experi-
ences in the world.
Black British Dance does not arrive with the same concerns as Black
American dance. There are overlaps, of course: aesthetic devices and the
importance of rhythm as a foundational organising tool; the need to con-
nect across geography and time through embodied practices of Black dia-
sporas; the excitement at the usefulness of dance as a weapon of community
actualization and self-definition. However, the differences matter as well.
Black USA produces all manner of music, movement, and glossy com-
mercial products for mass consumption alongside the private, experimen-
tal, spiritual, and resistant modes of dance. Black British Dance reveals
itself within the context of a neoliberal economy driven by the overexpo-
sure of Black American forms. In this volume, authors affirm that the
stories told by Black British artists reveal particular histories of dance
unlike any other. Reading along, we are invited to wonder: “What was it
like to imagine professional dance in 1960s Great Britain?”; “What have
been the problems in recognising Black British dance?”; “What do danc-
ers do in classes that are part of a matrix of Black British dance?”; “How
do we make art?”
Scholarship in dance necessarily takes on these difficult queries, as it
tries to align unpredictable, always-changing practice with the stability of
narrative and language. Researching Black British dance adds layers of
concern: “What is this scholarship for?”; “Whose philosophical traditions
do you stand in?”; “What sorts of movements matter most to you, and
why?”; “How do you feel dance?” And then there is more, of course: the
shifting paradigms of race and culture; questions of funding and access to
venues; the constructions of social time and community support through
forms of dance and their memory. The authors in this volume emphatically
tell stories of Black British dance so that others can learn their truths and
their ways of understanding how dance means.
In all of this, we raise as many questions as we might answer along the
way. Some ideas do become clear. It matters who creates the scholarship,
x FOREWORDS

and who they intend to encounter it. It matters who is talking, and to
whom. These stories of dance, and its emergences, and its affects intend to
construct a paradigm of discovery, one that places Black British experience
at the centre of research in dance. In all, this volume pushes us all, dancing
itself toward a series of “what if” propositions that I imagine as I read this
remarkable book:

“What if I tell you what I think about the dances I’ve done?
What if I tell you who I think I am when I dance?
What if I tell you my story in my own way?
And what if I shift the ways that these stories might be narrated?
Sometimes I write in theoretical academic writing, but sometimes in
anecdotal truth-telling. Will you be able to hear me?”

To this end, this volume expertly cajoles us,

“What I write here is only part of the story. Come closer, I will dance the rest …”

Foreword by Peter Badejo, OBE

‘The Walk Toward Legacy’
Metaphorically, dance, is a “corn seed” planted in a fertile human field
(society), be it the dance-expressions of the people of colour, Black or what-
ever terminology you may give. Once it germinates, it continues to grow,
feed and energise the body and soul of the living in that environment.

Black British Dance

There is no denying the fact that Britain has placed itself in a position of
great influence in all the colonies and it continues to exert its concept of
cultural and artistic superiority over its ex-colonies and the world at large.
This has been made possible through its dominance and grip on the dis-
semination of information on socio-cultural, economic, and political
developments. To enable a balanced understanding of existence, much
broader explanations must be explored and made available. There has
been a dearth of literature on Black British dance. Simply because we do
not write our experiences and history, Georg Hegel (1830–31 Lectures)
concluded that “Africa has no history, and that the history of Africa is the
history of Europeans living in Africa”. While Hegel is guilty of both cul-
tural myopism and inadequacy, dance practitioners of African descent or
 FOREWORDS
   xi

inspiration and academics—especially in Britain today, are guilty of a

greater crime of unchecked intellectual languorousness of unpardonable
proportion.

Narratives in Black British dance as a concept in exploring, intel-

lectualising, and documenting the experiences of artistes and their dif-
ferent stories is long overdue and this gallant and stimulating effort
must be commended. The insufficient analytical and documented mate-
rials on Black British cultural development have led to misinterpreta-
tions of cultural and artistic expressions. Artistes need to tell their stories
and given the varied background experiences of writers, artistes,
researchers, arts managers, and dance students, there is a need for peri-
odic debates and dialogues to capture and document emerging practices
and influences to avoid misrepresentation and build a body of knowl-
edge for Black British dance. Environments and cultural influences
shape our expressions. Pre-­colonial and post-colonial experiences still
determine, to a large extent, how we perceive and comment on socio-
cultural activities of others.
There is an African aphorism that says if you fail to tell your story the
way it actually is, someone else will tell it the way it suits them. One could
be forgiven for concluding that perceptions on dance expressions of non-­
European origins have been deliberately derogatory and in some cases
patronising. The playing field in the development of the arts in Britain has
not been even, hence the slowness, if not stagnation in the development
of some non-European art expressions in Britain.
Information is power and the capacity to analyse situations and work
towards solutions cannot be underestimated. It has been recognised for a
while that the knowledge base for capacity building in African and Diaspora
arts has been very limited. Acute lack of resources, research materials, and
the inconsistencies in funding policies over the past few decades have stul-
tified the efforts and attempts made by individuals and organisations to
create enduring institutions that could have developed the African and
Diaspora arts in Britain.
I believe that this book will serve as a peep through the door of knowl-
edge to explore further possibilities and legacies for artistes, researchers,
commentators, and writers, who will contribute their stories to the con-
tinuum of dialogue that will change perceptions and help enhance the
future creativity of artists. It will also free artists from the bondage of colour
xii Forewords

coding and labelling, which may have inhibited their identity as African
and Diaspora artists. This book I hope will spur the continued dialogue
that will empower the artists and educate the non-appreciation, assess-
ment, and judgement of ignorance of a privileged few who have for too
long classified dance expressions from African and Diaspora artists in many
unsuitable terms.

Duke University Thomas F. DeFrantz

Durham, NC, USA

Badejo Arts Independent Artist Peter Badejo

Lagos / London, Nigeria / UK
 Preface: Dancing Through This Book

The notion of dance from a British perspective consists of a number of

untold stories, some of which converge in the territory of Blackness,
Britishness and dance. This edited collection includes the work of a range
of emerging and established scholars and artists who all present responses
to the notion of Black British dance. The book’s aim is to offer the reader
theoretical possibilities for engaging with notions of Black British dance
while also providing dance-artists, and those involved in dance, reflections
on experiences they might have had or witnessed themselves.
As its title suggests the book takes inspiration from seeing Black Dance
as a complex, broad socio-cultural network of relationships and rhythms
that reach far and wide. The book is designed to be read in multiple ways:
from cover to cover, tracing themes using the index, reading the Parts as
independent sections, or picking out specific chapters to be read individu-
ally. It is hoped that the micro within the chapters are read alongside each
other in order to construct larger critically reflective pictures of the notion
of Black British dance. Chapters are grouped together under three sec-
tions: Paradigms, Processes and Products. Rather than attempting to be a
comprehensive overview, the book offers possible entryways to discussing
Blackness, Britishness and dance. As such it offers a rich archive of narra-
tives crafted through testimony. These serve the multiple purposes of cap-
turing key moments in personal and universal histories, as well as generating
multi-layered portraits of the embodied practices of dance in Britain. The
book also acts as a kind of resistance to the normative constrains of a single
Grand Narrative for Black British dance by underlining the importance of
telling the multiplicity of dancers’ “own” stories. The book challenges the

xiii
xiv PREFACE: DANCING THROUGH THIS BOOK

presumption that Blackness, Britishness or dance are monoliths. Instead,

it suggests that all three descriptors (Blackness, Britishness, and dance) are
living networks created by rich diverse histories, multiple faces, and infi-
nite future possibilities, the significance of which suggests a widening of
the constructs for what British dance looks like, where it appears, and who
is involved in its creation.
The collection includes the work of scholars and artists from across
the extended family of Blackness, Britishness, and dancers. Rooted in
the somatic-based, embodied experience of dancing, our starting point
is the belief that the moving body makes meaning through experience.
Through the complexities of their personal histories, sensations, reflec-
tions, and experiences, contributors share their narratives from within
the field of dance. Placed together in the book, these narratives create a
mosaic of understandings and interpretations for the reader to explore.
To this end, this book rejects the notion that we should (or even could)
define “Black British dance” and instead submits that there are common
threads, common experiences, and common expressions shared by those
who identify, or are identified as, or have a relationship with the notions
of British-ness, and Black-ness, and dancing. Holding to Africanist and
Indigenous (K. Anderson, 2000; hooks, 1992; Smith, 1999) and post-
modern (Burkitt, 1999; Desmond, 1997) values in which identity is
multi-­dimensional, transient, performed, and often projected, each
chapter is an individual response to the idea of “Black”, “British”, and
“Dance” while acknowledging that all three labels are contested and
open to interpretation. The book recognises that being Black, being
British, or being a dancer are personal stories and by no means amount
to a narrative with a single voice, nor do the qualifiers of “Black”,
“British”, or “dance” have defined borders and fixed meanings.
Therefore, the chapters do not claim to speak to one experience but col-
laboratively sit together with the aim of contributing to wider contexts
for the arts, culture, and what it means to create dance.
The non-dualist approach the book takes posits that phenomena (or
things) do not need to correspond to fixed definitions. As such, we draw
on the ethnographic (Clifford, 1997; Clifford, Marcus, & School of
American, 1986) and narrative approaches (Riessman, 2008; Schiff,
McKim, & Patron, 2017) to share a range of perspectives. Narrative
inquiry has differing significance according to the theoretical framework
from which it is written. Here the use of the narrative turn is used as a
verb. To tell the story is valued as “giving p­ resence to” the lived life of an
 PREFACE: DANCING THROUGH THIS BOOK
   xv

individual (Schiff in Hatavara, Hyden, & Hyvarinen, 2013, pp. 245–264).

Narrating reveals something of the constructed socio-cultural landscape in
which the story takes place (the Black, British, and Dance landscapes).
Following feminist theory (Butler, 1990, 1993), this provides a means to
trouble constructed stereotypes through sharing (embodied) felt, lived
experiences.
Here narrative inquiry provides a structure that allows for all commu-
nication to be representative, as story is the re-telling of experience
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Schiff, McKim, & Patron, 2017). Rather
than an attempt to actually communicate sensation (for instance of the
sensation of dancing), the writers attempt only to share what it means to
them, leaving space for the reader to find their own relationship with the
story. If we see dance as a site where understanding happens physically,
then we can assume that dance communicates something. Dancers engage
with multiple narratives because they are literate in multiple modes of
communication, for instance, in verbal literacy but also in physical literacy
(Whitehead, 2010) and visual literacy. The ethnographic nature of narra-
tive allows for the rhythm of the transforming, relationship-ed “I” to be
present and describe across its literacies. The ethnography of narrative is
sensitive to the paradox of how embodied experience can be represented,
communicated, and ultimately written about in text. Just as my Grandma
told me stories that are revealed across the complexity of the many mani-
festations of my identity, the narrative turn…

‘… moves from a singular, monolithic conception of social science towards a

pluralism that promotes multiple forms of representation… away from facts
and toward meanings… away from idolizing categorical thought and abstract
theory and toward embracing the values of irony, emotionality, and activism;
away from assuming the stance of disinterested spectator and toward assuming
the posture of a feeling, embodied, and vulnerable observer…Each of us judges
our lived experiences against the ethical, emotional, practical, and fateful
demands of life as we come to understand them.’ (Bochner, 2001, p. 134)

This book values the personal real-world knowledge of practice along-

side the theory of scholarship, underlining that at times, as we write as
dancers, we are re-telling a discovery that originated and remains primarily
in movement. Here the presence of embodied metaphor (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980) at home, resilient, and resonant in story, is also drawn
upon by the dancer for understanding, perceiving, and communicating
xvi PREFACE: DANCING THROUGH THIS BOOK

their moving body (Desmond, 1997). Acknowledging the act of moving

(dancing) generates knowing in itself, and leads us to acknowledge that
writing about dancing involves representation of that physical knowledge.
Therefore, it is not a direct sharing of the knowledge (—come into the
dance studio and dance with me for that), the story is a communication of
an experience. As discussed above, the book shares stories from the field
that reveal episodes of engagement with the idea of Black British dance. In
this way, narrative inquiry imagines the construction of the artist and
scholar as an on-going project and a shifting practice of transformations.
The book suggests moving away from the “scientific” need to define and
measure “who” or what Black British dance is, and moving toward asking
“when, where and how” Black British dance? (Riessman, 2008). The Self
is not trapped within the measurable shell of the body. Instead the Self is
the embodied, narrativised, self-coordinated by the sensations, relation-
ships and rhythms of lived day-to-day movement. These are shared here to
give insights in to artistic practices.
Each contributor to the book tells their story from within the experi-
ence of Black, British and dance (whether it be as a dance teacher, chore-
ographer, dance scholar, practicing artists or all of these). This is done in
order to stimulate further conversation. Therefore, the book explores the
multi-layered, multi-dimensional nature of artists and artistic work in
order to reject the injustice of attempting to classify Black British dance as
“one thing”. The book also attempts to avoid simply responding to
“White” representations of Black-ness (hooks, 1992). Rather, the book
constructs the interwoven relationships of dance across the African and
British Diasporas.
Accompanying the book, there is also a web-site that acts as an on-­
going collection of interviews and sharing of practices http://narrativesin-
dance.com. The web-site acts as a doorway using interviews to look from
outside in to the lived experiences of artists’ practices. The book acts as a
doorway from inside artists’ practices to speaking out through sharing
their own narratives about dance.

Middlesex University Adesola Akinleye

London, UK
 PREFACE: DANCING THROUGH THIS BOOK
   xvii

References
Anderson, K. (2000). A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood.
Toronto: Sumach Press.
Bochner, A. (2001). Narrative’s Virtues. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(2), 131–157.
Burkitt, I. (1999). Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity, and Modernity.
London/Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York/London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York:
Routledge.
Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative Inquiry: Experience and
Story in Qualitative Research (1st ed.). San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.
Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
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Clifford, J., Marcus, G. E., & School of American, R. (1986). Writing Culture:
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA/London: University of
California Press.
Desmond, J. (1997). Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham,
NC./London: Duke University Press.
Hatavara, M., Hyden, L.-C., & Hyvarinen, M. (2013). The Travelling Concepts of
Narrative. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
hooks, B. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End
Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. London:
SAGE.
Schiff, B., McKim, A. E., & Patron, S. (2017). Life and Narrative: The Risks and
Responsibilities of Storying Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.
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 Contents

1 Narratives in Black British Dance: An Introduction   1

Adesola Akinleye

Part I Paradigms  19

2 “I Don’t Do Black-Dance, I Am a Black Dancer”  23

Namron

3 Dance Britannia: The Impact of Global Shifts on Dance

in Britain  31
Christy Adair and Ramsay Burt

4 Negotiating African Diasporic Identity in Dance: Brown

Bodies Creating and Existing in the British Dance
Industry  37
Tia-Monique Uzor

5 Tracing the Evolution of Black Representation in Ballet

and the Impact on Black British Dancers Today  51
Sandie Bourne

xix
xx Contents

6 In-the-Between-ness: Decolonising and Re-inhabiting

Our Dancing  65
Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred

Part II Processes  79

7 Trails of Ado: Kokuma’s Cultural Self-Defence  83

Thea Barnes

8 
Moving Tu Balance: An African Holistic Dance as a
Vehicle for Personal Development from a Black
British Perspective 101
Sandra Golding

9 ‘Why I Am Not a Fan of the Lion King’: Ethically

Informed Approaches to the Teaching and Learning of
South African Dance Forms in Higher Education in
the United Kingdom 115
Sarahleigh Castelyn

10 Performativity of Body Painting: Symbolic Ritual as

Diasporic Identity 131
Chikukwango Cuxima-Zwa

11 Dancehall: A Continuity of Spiritual, Corporeal Practice

in Jamaican Dance 167
H. Patten

12 Our Ethiopian Connection: Embodied Ethiopian Culture

as a Tool in Urban-­Contemporary Choreography 187
Ras Mikey (Michael) Courtney
 Contents 
   xxi

13 Reflections: Snapshots of Dancing Home, 1985, 2010

and 2012 201
Hopal Romans

Part III Products 213

14 Battling Under Britannia’s Shadow: UK Jazz Dancing in

the 1970s and 1980s 217
Jane Carr

15 Caribfunk Technique: A New Feminist/Womanist

Futuristic Technology in Black Dance Studies in Higher
Education 235
A’Keitha Carey

16 More Similarities than Differences: Searching for New

Pathways 249
Beverley Glean and Rosie Lehan

17 Epistemology of the Weekend: Youth Dance Theatre 265

Hopal Romans, Adesola Akinleye, and Michael Joseph

18 Transatlantic Voyages: Then and Now 277

Anita Gonzalez

Index285
 Notes on Contributors

Adesola Akinleye is a choreographer and artist-scholar. She trained at

Rambert Academy and began her career as a dancer with Dance Theatre of
Harlem later establishing her own company, Saltare (now Adesola Akinleye/
DancingStrong), whilst living in New York, for which she was awarded the
1999 national Women’s History Month award for Distinguished Achievement
in the Field of Dance’ by Town of Islip, NY. She has been a part of Canadian
nationwide artists-in-schools programmes as well as teaching at the University
of Manitoba. She studied choreography with Bessie Schönberg and her cho-
reographic work has been commissioned and toured across the UK and
North America. In the UK she has danced with Green Candle Dance
Company, and Carol Straker Dance Company, among others. She has been
awarded the Association of Dance of the African Diaspora Trailblazers
Fellowship 2005, the Bonnie Bird New Choreographers Award, 2006 and One
Dance UK’s Champion Trailblazer Award, 2016. She has taught and created
work in universities in the UK, Canada and the USA, as well as being artist-
in-residence for arts-in-education programmes such as Creative Partnerships
(UK) and Learning Through The Arts (CA). She is a Senior Lecturer at
Middlesex University and visiting lecturer at a number of universities in the
USA. She holds a PhD from Canterbury Christ Church University and an
MA (distinction) in Work-Based Learning: Dance in education and commu-
nity from Middlesex University UK. She is a Fellow of the RSA.
Christy Adair Professor Emerita (Dance Studies) York St John University,
wrote Dancing the Black Question: the Phoenix Dance Company Phenomenon
(Dance Books: 2007). Her research interests, developed in Women and

xxiii
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Kissi on viisas elään. Niin on vanhapoikaki. Kissi ei koskaan
maista, ennenku se haistaa. Ja se on viisahasti tehty. Mutta
vanhapoika ei haista eikä maista. S'oon viälä viisaheet.

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Kissi on puhras elään. Niin on vanhapoikaki puhras ja purkis ku

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sinne puronnukki.

Kissi on sähkööne elään. Niin on vanhapoikaki. Jos sen turkkia

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Kissi näköö pimiäs. Niin teköö vanhatpoijakki. Ja sitä varte niitä

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lujaa kinnattu, mutta henkiä ei oo irti saatu. Niinki lujaa on
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sittekää!

Jos vanhatpoijat nyt hävitethän, nii pitääs toki ajatella niitä orpoja
lapsukaisia, jokka — — jaa jaa tuata…
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
SEKAHERELMIÄ: ETELÄPOHJALAISIA MURREJUTTUJA ***

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