Victoria Santa Cruz, Me gritaron negra, 1971

Sara Goméz, Y Tenemos Sabor, 1971

Katherine Dunham, Carnival of Rhythm, 1941

NIC Kay, Keep At It, 2021

Victoria Santa Cruz stands proud and adroit proclaiming her blackness in Me gritaron negra (1971). She shouts “Negra” over and over with images of hands clapping, hips moving cut in rhythm to the beat. She reclaims the word – that was hurled as an insult – as source of pride.  The works in this program all perform acts of reclaiming through movement and gesture. illustrating scholar Katherine McKittrick, invocation that ‘dance is the enunciation of black livingness”. Y Tenemos Sabor (1967) by Sara Goméz surveys the history of Cuban music by instituting the specificity of the country’s instruments interspersed by live performances of rumba, conga and habanera bands replete with demonstrations of the corresponding dances and euphoric crowds breaking out from the confines of a public square to move together. Maya Deren’s mentor, Katherine Dunham’s Carnival of Rhythm (1941) is documentation of the sociologist, choreographer and progenitor of the Dunham Technique’s staged performances which she toured with her dance troupe across Europe and North American introducing audiences to African dance traditions. Finally, in NIC Kay’s Keep at It (2021), part of their #blackpeopledancingontheinternet series, Kay performs for the camera with small, quotidian gestural movements outside on a handball court emphasising what should be seen as the ordinariness of moving through the world.