Invisible Power: African Body Culture Reshapes Contemporary Dance
After providing a cultural context of African diasporas, this lecture will delve into the significant impacts of African dance and creation on contemporary dance.
“Black” does not merely refer to skin color and “Afro” does not merely refer to a fashion trend or style. Rather, these make up a unique physical perception system that encompasses several recognizable aesthetic features: dominant percussion, continuous and multiple beats and rhythms, layered musical performances and dances, witty call-and-response, angular movements, individual expression within a group, and dynamic “flash of the spirit.”
The aim of this lecture is to analyze how this physical perception system, long obscured and undervalued amid modern aesthetics, became an invisible power in the performing arts world. Its remarkable resilience, as well as its continuous transformation, reconstruction, and reinvention, in its time of obscurity, as well as its prominence today in providing a constant source of inspiration for contemporary dance, street dance, and experimental works will also be explored.
Lecturer｜Wu Meng-Hsuan
Wu Meng-Hsuan is currently a doctoral student in the School of Dance at Taipei National University of the Arts, a board member of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) (Taiwan), and author of Lu Dong De Di Se: Jie Wu De Qing Dong Zheng Zhi Yu Dang Dai Bian Yi (Underlying Rhythms: Politics of Affect and Contemporary Variations in Street Dance). In recent years, Wu has translated André Lepecki’s Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance and served as a nomination observer for the 20th-21st Taishin Arts Awards and a critic for the Reviewing Performing Arts Taiwan platform. Wu’s reviews and interviews have appeared in Taihsin’s Artalks, ARTouch, Reviewing Performing Arts Taiwan, Performing Arts Refined (PAR), and IATC’s Critique in the Front Line.
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