As I teach, whether in institutions of academia, studio settings for professional artists, or community centers with folks of various ages and relationships to performance, I commit to discovering ways that our class/workshop/practice experiences can invite students/participants/practitioners to bring their full selves, full bodies into the space. Each setting, each place of practice has its own history, as does each student, as does each form of practice, as does each teacher.

My role as a dance teacher can function most appropriately when I am paying attention to how various places, people, histories can meet one another in respectful and empowered ways. I like to imagine the dance class as a space of negotiations (I borrow this term from scholar/artist Thomas F. DeFrantz).  In these negotiations, we will be honest about the divergent ways that we experience and imagine time, space, energy, motivation, intention, relationship, and propriety. We will share, we will be together, will make mistakes and commit offenses, we will apologize earnestly, we will check ourselves, we will keep going.

As elusive as the concept is, I imagine the dance class as a place in which we can practice embodiment together from a source of love, and let that generate a beauty that we may not understand right away, and that we will consistently need to reevaluate.

I aim to encourage and create space for all bodies and gender expressions.

Upcoming Class/Workshop Schedule

Classes/Workshops

BIG BODY: Experimental J-Sette Performance Workshop

J-Sette, also known as Bucking, is a performance style popular in the southern United States, practiced widely among majorettes and drill teams at historically Black colleges and universities, and also among teams of primarily queer men who compete in gay clubs and pride festivals. The workshop focuses on bombastic performance energy, complex relationships to rhythm and music, movement precision, group dynamics, and discovering joy in flesh and community. We will explore how the performance of J-Sette creates expectations around attention and accountability to a community, and how it positions leadership.  All bodies are encouraged to participate, regardless of previous training or ability.

This class is often taught in partnership with Jermone Donte Beacham.

Photo Credit: Chris Cameron

Tension Continuums

This course is designed to introduce skills and performance sensibilities in the areas of Modern and Contemporary Dance techniques, specifically as they relate to tension, meta-tension, and sequentiality. Movement will be sourced from an array of US American post-modern and social dance sources (i.e. release techniques, dancehall, Umfundalai), as well as European contemporary dance sources (i.e. Countertechnique, Flying Low, Axis Syllabus technique). Our work will be in the service of defining techniques and values to equip our physical, mental, and emotional bodies with skills to be readily mobile, present, attentive and communicative. We will explore our bodies in dynamic alignment, moving toward an understanding of the infinities that exist inside and outside of our physical bodies and our metaphysical selves.  Ideally, the course will be a useful tool to ignite growth in students as learners, dancers, and performers. The course will also include adapted warm-up choreographies developed by dancer and anatomist Irene Dowd, by whom I have been mentored and trained since 2009.

Photo Credit: Marcelo Thomaz

The Switching

I like to imagine that this practice in performance improvisation, The Switching, is a strategy in immediate evolution, rapid-fire shifting, sublime learning of and in the moment. I began this practice while dealing with my curiosities around a question I obsessed over: “Can I change myself?”

Our practice will deal with strategic essentialization – through the immediate re-design of ourselves into other creatures, or other ways of being our innate creatures – and working with immediately identifying the restrictions/limitations that are inescapable. It’s round about, and ideally will come full circle.

Now, in this moment, it’s circle/curve through my distals, and my distals
are everywhere, and my desire travels in orbits, in cycles, and my vision is a limb.
And now, in this moment, my vision is a limb, and I am comprised of everything
that I can sense that I cannot see, and I am composed of the same
material all throughout my body, and my voice is flat.
And now, in this moment, my voice is flat, and my rhythm is insistently
percussive, and my organs erupt to propel me into movement, and
then they recompose themselves, and I am responsible for all of the sound I can
hear, and I am feeling overwhelmed at all of my responsibility, and my
erotic desire is piercing through my pores.

For me, there is something deeply spiritual about it, something confusing, something humbling/humiliating about it. I feel like it has theoretical links to code switching, especially as it has to do with my Blackness and queerness, experiences of immediate compartmentalization/contextualization as a defense mechanism, as a means of survival.

“It kinda asks the “safe space” academic overuse and misuse to reexamine itself cause not only am I accountable for what I’m choosing to put into the room, but I’m acknowledging that there are things about my makeup/training/culture/privilege/unconscious/blind spots that can also cause a shift in the room or the community or the world for better or for worse or who knows really what the effect will be. Something about this philosophy is great to me because it doesn’t make me feel like I have to fret. It doesn’t make me feel totally paralyzed to choose or move. It does make me hyper-diligent about the messiness of it all, the plurality of it all.“

—Christina Gesualdi

Photo Credit: Chris Cameron

Umfundalai (Various Levels)

Umfundalai is a contemporary African dance technique that comprises its movement vocabulary from dance traditions throughout the Diaspora.  The literal word, Umfundalai, means “essence” or “essential” in Kiswahili.  Much like the late Katherine Dunham, Kariamu Welsh (Umfundalai’s progenitor) has designed a stylized movement practice that seeks to articulate an essence of African-oriented movement or as she describes, “an approach to movement that is wholistic, body centric and organic.”  In my own approach to Umfundalai, I am interested in how the studio classroom can be a place to centralize Africanist aesthetics and notions of community building, and also a place to honor tradition while using critical analysis to ask what tradition has to do with our own respective human selves.  I am also interested in approaching the traditions of the class with a queer sensibility, examining the importance of historical gender roles as it has to do with this form, and antagonizing those traditions in our practice.  I have been a Professional Umfundalai Certified Teacher since 2016, and a practitioner since 2002.

Sweat to the Beat of Slow Motion

We are going to welcome the slow jam onto the dance floor, and meet it with a close embrace – maybe just of our individual selves, or of a consensual partner… or maybe more than one. Let’s get close; feel our wise hips swing into dimly lit spaces, hear inhales and exhales from a mouth hovering near our ear, pumping oxygen for a heart rate that’s pulsing a bit faster than usual… Let’s see what we can get up to way down below 95 bpm. Let’s be people dancing up on other people, when we want to and when we are wanted. Let’s ask for and give our permission for the proximity that we are desiring. Let’s be queer and normal and strange and open and close… very close… Sweating to the beat of slow motion. This is a collective exercise in exploring slow, and experimenting with how to construct a mutually attentive unit with someone else – leading, following, and getting tangled in a consensual gray area. Within this, we will explore movement related to the hip swing of the J-Sette march, the entangled embrace of forms like Cuban Son and Angolan Kizomba, and the importance of deeply communicative pelvic movement in African-descended dance forms. We will disrupt gendered notions about who follows and who leads, slowly discovering the ways we would like to embrace and be embraced on the dance floor.

Photo Credit: Gema Galiana