A performance choreographed by Jean-Sebastien Duvilaire with Daniel Brevil on drums, students, and community members brought together at the end. Renee Foster, director of HRUA dances with me at the end. We performed as part of HRUA’s pop-up Thanksgiving Farmer’s Market in November 2024.
In 2024-2025 I served as a Tidewater Faculty Fellow, CNU’s Center for Community Engagement program that supports faculty in the creation and teaching of community engaged learning courses. HONR 310(4): Dance Studies – Community Engaged Performance, posed the question asserted by writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit, How can dance and performance in relation to place help us “to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future?” Students explored interdisciplinary performance praxes which engage community, history, and social justice. They read about environmental injustice, community-engaged learning, African American foodways, embodied knowledges, and performance praxes and theories that explore ways dance and embodied epistemologies can acknowledge, communicate, resist, protest, embrace, draw attention to, and offer up new possibilities for relationality, community building, awareness, and healing.
We attended to our own shared history between Christopher Newport University and the Newport News community and partnered with community organizations who are responding to and countering the legacies of institutional and government policies that have resulted in food scarcity and environmental degradation including Hampton Roads Urban Agriculture (HRUA) and the Newport News Green Foundation (NNGF). The course included a culminating dance/performance event for each site/partner with the goals to activate the space and engage the community.
