Homemakin: How Black Women Stage Otherlives and “Werk” Out Salvation Through Dance

Abstract

Homemakin: How Black Women Stage Otherlives and “Werk” Out Salvation Through Dance examines the methods Black women use to design, choreograph, and perform what in a consciously expansive sense of the term I identify as a culturally and politically salient form of homemakin that is site-specific to the church, the stage and the club. The three sites together make up what I call the Black sacred triad, a zone of theatrical world-making. Through movement and performance, Black women resist rigid notions of being “white American cis male” and instead fashion homeplaces where Black people can strive as subjects, be affirmed and restored (hooks). Examining underground house music and dance cultures and Liturgical Dance in the Black Church, both situated in Washington, DC and the surrounding suburbs, and following, elements of both in live stage performance, Homemakin: How Black Women Stage Otherlives and “Werk” Out Salvation Through Dance bridges the sacred and the profane, arguing that for Black people movement, regardless of place, is salvific. In this oral history and auto-ethnographic project I trace my own performing body in the church, on the stage and in the club, tracking the narratives and epistemologies that inhabited these spaces before me and have been imprinted on my very own body. The cypher, the Kongo cosmogram, and the Jamaican folk dance Kumina animate the narratives threading the epistemologies that are Black dance. Sites of investigation for Homemakin include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, live dance works such as LaTasha Barnes’ The Jazz Continuum and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, as well as digital ephemera, the testimonies and personal papers of everyday Black women artists.