Project Description:

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. 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.