Dreaming the Impossible

This research reaches across the discourses of Contemporary Dance and Social Sciences. Placing the Black body as a site of interrogation, the enquiry investigates how Blackness can be reimagined through the use of dance improvisation. Using improvised movement in performance as a tool to access Black ancestral embodied knowledge allows for such knowledges to transfigure in live space and time, so enabling embodied awareness be spontaneous in its arrival and definition. Therefore, in creating an opening for the Black body to produce alternative histories, can lead to a rewriting of previously prescribed scripting of the body. The investigation is underpinned by an auto-ethnographic, socio-intertextual exploration; the creative methodology consists of an improvisational performance practice centralising embodied and lived experiences of (my) Black female body, supported by a written thesis. Situating the research within a wider context, Eurocentric ideologies rule the western world where racial bias and white privilege are prevalent in the makeup of society. However, more then ever we are seeing a global shift taking place where black and brown individuals are demanding a reconstruction of the Eurocentric structures which we operate within. An urgency has emerged in the demand for Eurocentric ideologies to be decolonised and deconstructed. For this reason, not only is there societal space for the research this study proposes, but also a requisite.