There are many Ways to make a clearing

DEC 1

4PM

PUBLIC TRUST
4017 WaLNUT STREET

Strategies on Black queer feminist freedom-making

CEE Fellow Jennifer Harge will present her ongoing archival project that houses movement scores, maps, prayers, and citations she's utilized over the last decade to craft a Blackqueer feminist creative praxis as a dancemaker in Detroit, MI. In this presentation, Harge will share choreographic entry points into the archive and discuss the permissions she has given herself and her work to build a practice rooted in Black longevity. Harge will be joined by scholar-practitioner and assistant professor of Africana Studies, Jasmine Johnson.

JENNIFER HARGE

JASMINE E. JOHNSON

Jennifer Harge is an interdisciplinary choreographer, performance artist, and educator based in Detroit, MI. She approaches creative practice as a space to design and execute strategies to thrive in Blackqueer flesh. She privileges her interiority and subjectivity as form to move from/move with/reroute/reimagine/reinvent the stories sitting in her blood memories. 

She most recently served as the Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair in Dance at UCLA where she taught studio courses on Black Feminist spatialities and Black compositional thought (word to Torkwase Dyson). She is currently developing  FLY | DROWN, a multi-form fable series centering Black sovereignty. While in residence at the Center for Experimental Ethnography, Harge will teach a graduate seminar on Black Feminist Thought and Performance Composition.  Informed by theories of time, space, presence, and the body, the course will work from movement-based investigations prompted by a range of Black feminist texts and performances to position performance composition as a site of research, intervention, ritual, and protest.

Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Her work explores the politics of black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Johnson's interdisciplinary research and teaching are situated at the intersection of diaspora theory, dance and performance studies, ethnography, and black feminisms.
Her first book project, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, is a transnational ethnography on the industry of West African dance. Johnson has received a number of fellowships and grants including those from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has been published by The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Dance Research Journal, Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Theater Survey, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Aster(ix) and elsewhere. She serves as a Board Director for the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance and for the Dance Studies Association.