Digital Black Dance Ecologies Network

Summary
The environmental crisis and social injustice are the biggest challenges of our time and Black communities are disproportionately impacted by their intersections. The turn within dance practice to digital technologies such as virtual reality, screendance and immersive realities has allowed Black performance makers to navigate creatively through social and environmental injustice. Through the investigation of contemporary African and African diasporic dance, this network explores, from an embodied understanding, how digital Black dance practices illuminate the junctures of social and ecological injustice and offer strategies for imagining black futures through the ideas of fugitivity and belonging. The network brings together scholars, artists, practitioners, and artist-researchers whose work explicitly and implicitly explores social and environmental injustice across black geographies in both physical and digital spaces. These interlocutors are brought together to exchange practices and ideas in order to stimulate new thought, exploratory practice, and original research. It is essential that the connections between social and environmental challenges are explored and focused on within critical dance studies as their disproportionate impact on Black communities poses a fundamental threat to the sustainability and vibrancy of dance ecosystems around the world.

As part of its aims, the network will catalyse digital Black dance research and practice in the UK. This will be achieved through a series of commissions and development workshops for black dance artists, early career mentorship for black dance scholars and workshops for writing a PhD proposal for Black postgraduate students in dance.