I’m interested in what happens when we gather together in community and engage in rituals of remembrance. Communion is communal/relational, embodied, and spiritual/sacred, and so is pole dance.

My current dissertation title is “Sacred Communions: Exploring Black Women’s Relationships through Dance.” Communion is a good term because it doesn’t have to be religious, but it is in the way that I use it. Communion also worked out better because I’m interested in relationships.

I put that poem in the article I submitted on pole as a more liberating and alternative space to the Black Church for Black women and femmes, so hopefully they publish it. My family said baptism was doing too much though and was bordering on heresy, so I shifted to communion.

When I started this project, I wrote a poem about a woman who goes to the altar to be baptized, except it’s not the altar but the pole studio, and she’s not baptized into Christianity but baptized into a journey that often includes a new name, a pole name.

Also, all of these things are constantly buzzing around in my head as I do my research on liturgical (praise and worship) dance and pole dance.

I hope I can come back and tease out some of these thoughts when I’m done preparing for my February workshop and conference presentation. I am in the midst of reading about dance, Christianity, and repression in preparation for the workshop.

I have thoughts on how Western culture and Christianity have shaped some perceptions around dance. I have thoughts on who gets to determine which forms of dance are “appropriate.” I have thoughts on dance as a cultural and communal practice and ritual.

It draws on the chapter of my dissertation that discusses kinship, community, and the relationships we develop in dance.

For more info or to register, visit: bwsasymposium.vfairs.com

Throughout the workshop, participants will be invited to participate in an embodied meditation, move through a spiritual dance exercise, and witness a pole dance.

We’ll trace movement practices, from the ring shout to liturgical (praise and worship) dance to pole dance, as we interweave scholarly resources, oral histories, ethnography, and autoethnography.

This workshop explores how dance forms practiced by Black Christian women in the United States have changed and evolved over time. We’ll reflect on their African roots, discuss the function of dance in the lives of Black Christian women today, and imagine Black Christian dance futures…

I’m interested in how we might have a little church woman in us and a little blues woman in us, how we’re complex beings that don’t always fit easily into certain categories.

Like the blues, pole dance becomes a space where Black women can embody sensual, sexual, and erotic freedom. While the blues women and the church women are often read in contrast, I think their contemporaries have more in common than we might realize.

This is one of the histories that I think about in terms of my research. I’m interested in Black women who choose to participate in liturgical dance and pole dance in their leisure time and what it offers for them in terms of embodied freedom.

Blues music became a way for Black women to express themselves and free themselves from their daily conditions.

They could sing about the men in their lives and the violence they faced at the hands of these men. They could sing about their women lovers. They talked about the struggles of what it means to be a working class Black woman and the injustices that they face.

Both Dr. Hazel Carby and Dr. Angela Davis talk about Black women blues artists. In contrast to the church women, those invested in a certain respectability politics, blues women were disrespectable. They embodied a certain level of resistance and defiance.

In the blues, Black women could assert their sexual agency and privilege their pleasure, challenging gender norms that argued that a woman’s place was in the home.

However, sometimes the white families they worked with would even try to control that, attempting to develo policies that would prohibit them from going to jook joints. They did so because they were uncomfortable with their Black women workers embracing their sensual and erotic freedom.