October Archive Feature: Advancing Studies of Queer Black Dance through Research, Curriculum, and Public Engagement
What is “queer black dance?” How might choreography help us to understand the inseparable, intimate relationship between sexuality, race, and gender? This project explored these questions with David Roussève and former artists of his “REALITY” dance company. Roussève is a choreographer/writer/director/performer, a Guggenheim Fellow, a “Bessie” awardee, Creative Capital Fellow, 3-time Horton awardee, CalArts/Alpert awardee in Dance, recipient of 4 “Best Film” awards for his three short films, and grantee of 7 consecutive NEA fellowships. Since 1988, his dance/theater company REALITY has performed throughout the UK, Europe, S. America, and the U.S including four commissions for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. In 2018 Roussève premiered the full-evening REALITY work “Halfway to Dawn”, a piece that seeks to uncover the emotional ‘truths’ in the life of gay, immensely private African American jazz composer and Duke Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn.
The purpose and goal of the project was to engage and immerse BFA dance students at Rutgers in black queer contemporary movement through a residency with David Roussève and members of his REALITY dance company, so that students experienced firsthand an intersectional practice of dancemaking.
The Mason Gross dance department inaugurated a new curriculum in 2022, which put diversity,
equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the center of their program. By bringing Roussève to Rutgers, students had an opportunity to experience two major pillars of the DEI curriculum: the “contemporary fusion movement practice” and “Afro-diasporic dance” through Roussève’s technique of contact improvisation, jazz, and modern.
The one week-residency allowed students from at least three courses to participate in daily technique and choreographic instruction. In addition to these guest lectures, further deliverables included a public conversation with Roussève and two artists of REALITY, which enabled an opportunity to advance the ISGRJ goal of “faculty from across the campuses” working “in collaboration.”
The project was led by Alessandra Lebea Williams, Associate Professor of Dance, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Alessandra Williams, PhD, is Associate Professor of Dance at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Williams co-edited the anthology Dancing Transnational Feminisms and her monograph, Bittersweet, identifies artistic-historical foundations for queer black dance. Williams was a 2023-2024 Early Career Faculty Fellow with ISGRJ.
