Diasporic School of Arts & Culture

Diasporic Movement Collective

Freezing downtown dance studios, City Hall x-rays, and decoding legal hieroglyphics have paid off!

We have started a new non-profit dance/artist company based in Austin, but with global ambitions. This is an international collective of artist-scholars from the U.S., Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, Mali, Morocco, Colombia, and South Africa. We are creating a common language out of many, a universal culture based on the past, the present, and our collective futures. Our goal is to educate using the stage, streets, and studio.

This is an alliance of artists with a lifestyle dominated by cool. This has become more than the weekend club and a 9-5 job, this technique of ours is a tradition, lifestyle, philosophy, and a way to live on our own terms.

Performance, teaching, and training collaborations in the Americas are underway. Phase II of this project is for ALL of us to work together under one roof and perform on one stage

What links us?

We put African soul and the get-down in every movement from the lindy swing-out to the boogaloo roll. From the bomba freeze to the p irouette
Call and response between performers, audience, DJ and musicians
Our dance careers began and ends in the circle
Body isolations are syncopated
We combine improvisation and choreography
“Dance” does not describe all that we do

Documentary

We are creating a documentary spanning four continents about the company’s triumphs, awakening, broken friendships, life in warzones, censorship from governments, and slow evolution into a family of misfits.

Academic and Studio Classes Offered:

How we know what we know

Kitchen table sessions with grandparents and relatives
Juke-joints in Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Tapes of Yo! MTV Raps
Stories from migrant workers in L.A. and Santo Domingo
UCLA Young Research Library, Schomburg Library in Harlem, Martínez Villena Library in Havana, Benson Latin American Collection in Austin
Exchange videos on USB flash drives with Cuban dancers on the Island
Messing with analog drum-machines in downtown Detroit basements
Sleeping on each other’s couches so we can afford to travel, train, share, and collaborate
Representing in the club, audition, and dance class
Trial and error on the stage
From Old School dance pioneers from the Funk Era
Use our own experiences to imagine a world that does not yet exist