Watch the August 4 Performance on Instagram Live on August 4 via YouTube and the Urban Arts Space Instagram.
Performances will be held on August 3, 4, and 5 at 7:00 PM, followed by an artist talkback.
Two interactive movement workshops, one for K–12 students and one for all ages, will be held on August 5 from 2:30–3:30 PM and 4:00–5:00 PM respectively.
Thick Like Me … The Dawn of Body Liberation is about Body Liberation for all, focusing on the intersection of fat Black women in dance. This exhibition and performance reimagine what types of artists and what kinds of bodies are celebrated in fine art spaces. Centering fat Black women through the creative process, exhibition, performances, and talk-back will invert hierarchical systems of oppression. When thick Black women take center stage, systemic injustices of patriarchy, racism, and fatphobia are resisted and dismantled in favor of justice and liberation.
In this performance, exhibition, and talk-back, we excavate the underlying theories and histories that have resulted in the subjugation of fat Black women in dance, including Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Theory, Body Liberation, and Black Performance Theory. The exhibition and performance will provide counternarratives by uplifting current practitioners who support the liberation of their own bodies and everyone else's. Interactive stations featuring film, photos, creative hands-on activities, interactive digital media, and resources will be displayed throughout the gallery to encourage audiences to reflect on their own positionality within systems of power.
About the artists:
Alesondra (Alex) Christmas - A doctoral candidate in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University whose dissertation research focuses on Racial Battle Fatigue in Black women dance educators. Her work uplifts Black women in dance through valuing their thought, labor, and creative practices within the academy and beyond.
Jazelynn Goudy - A gravity-defying performing artist, scholar, and Elliot Norton Award-winning choreographer whose Black girl movement vocabulary is an array of life experiences. She is an Assistant Professor at Marymount Manhattan College, a Steering Committee member of Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving, a Ladies of Hip Hop Board member, and a guest artist for SLMDances.
Davianna Griffin - A surging international artist-scholar, performer, and curator of spaces that amplify the voices and lineages of the Black existence. Her movement vocabulary is rooted in Africanist aesthetics, traditions, and histories that inform her autoethnographic-embodied-ancestral memory practices. As a queer creative, she frequently collaborates with other artists and questions how embodied practices can serve as a voice for those who are silenced. Davianna has worked as a dance faculty member at the Governor’s School for the Arts and Old Dominion University. She will soon join the dance faculty at Slippery Rock University.
