Joselli Deans Moderated Collegium for African Diaspora Dance

Professor Joselli Deans, along with P. Kimberleigh Jordan, moderated an adjudicated panel at The Collegiumfor African Diaspora Dance (CADD) titled “Arthur Mitchell’s Love Letter: Dance Theatre of Harlem and Its Legacies.” The panel gathered the co-editors and writers of the forthcoming anthology of the same name (for which Deans is an editor).

This anthology project brings together researchers and legacy stakeholders in Dance Theatre of Harlem historiography to share a long-delayed multivalent portrait of the company, school, and neighborhood in its various African diasporic and aesthetic expertise. This presentation will highlight the following: articulate ballet as a Black dance practice that exists among countless other Black dance practices in the African Diaspora, consider the “enfleshed” geographies of the collective of dance artists who toured the globe as a major concert dance company for over three decades, and consider Harlem as both the material location where the company resides as well as its cultural, pedagogical, and aesthetic mapping of freedom practices throughout the physical world.