3pm GMT +1 start

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3:00-3:15pm

Opening talk 

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3:15-3:55pm

Antonio Bukhar Ssebuuma 

Teaching Afro-fusion in higher education as a means to aid decolonisation

“Styles such as afro-fusion should be promoted in higher education curriculum so as to offer citizenship to marginalised groups of people. Antonio will draw on examples from different Universities to share experiences of how afro-fusion offers a space for free expression. It allows students to break away from the dominant colonial approach to dance learning and practices, which allows them to find their own identity that influences their artistic and creative voices.”

 

Ijeme Aikhionbare 

Black Adult Dancers

The conversation about black adult dancers getting into the professional space sparks the thought of what we consider as “dancing”.
In a perfect world, I would see black dancers performing the nutcracker in the Royal ballet or the American ballet theater. In a perfect world, I would have to fill a diversity form for a performance job. I would not have to worry about how old I was to apply for an opportunity.
This utopian idea exists only in the dreams of humans who dare to hope for things they have imagined would be their lives. Coming from Africa, ballet or contemporary dance is not the norm when it comes to professional dance, therefore, getting an onset early dance training can be almost impossible. However, after years of self-training, this African girl traveled across continents to have the training she’s always wanted and she’s faced with one limitation, ageism.
I ask again, who creates these standards? 

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Break 

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4:00-5:00pm

Sylvia Antonia Nannyonga-Tamusuza, PhD ; Alfdaniels Mabingo; Gerald Ssemaganda; Ronald Kibirige, PhD

Decolonising Dance-Music Research, Pedagogy, and Community Engagement:

Experiences from Makerere University

"Higher education in Uganda, like in many other countries in postcolonial Africa, is still grappling with colonial legacies. Some of the individualistic conceptions and methodological approaches in research and pedagogy on dance and dance-musics are still informed by Euro- American canons. Consequently, the multi-layered communal essences and meanings of indigenous dance epistemologies have continued to be erased, undermined, and mystified. As postcolonial dance scholars and thinkers operating within the aforementioned environment, our reflections on the topic of this presentation were triggered by the following question: How are we engaging indigenous dance epistemologies in research, pedagogy, and community engagements as a decolonising agenda in higher education?"

 

Break

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5:10-6:10pm

Ananya Chatterjea

"Unmarked Legacies inside Contemporary Dance: Thoughts from a South-South Perspective."
In this talk, I will argue that, while Contemporary Dance is imagined as having a global belonging, the field holds Euro-white currencies of "risk" and "innovation" at core. Part of decolonizing Contemporary Dance is to turn attention to that promise of global possibility, and reimagine contemporaneity from a South-South lens, with an intersectional notion of "difference" as a central organizing principle.

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