{"id":8946,"date":"2018-10-12T16:31:38","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T20:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=8946"},"modified":"2018-10-13T10:29:10","modified_gmt":"2018-10-13T14:29:10","slug":"racines-black-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/10\/12\/racines-black-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Racines Black Dance Festival Shows \u2018How We Got To Today As People, But Through Music And Dance\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI wanted to start this festival because Boston has this lack of education about people of color even though we constitute a huge majority of the population,\u201d the Boston dancer and choreographer Mckersin says of the Racines Black Dance Festival<\/a>, which arrives next week for its second year.<\/p>\n

The title \u201cracines\u201d means \u201croots\u201d\u2014and that\u2019s what the festival aims to get at via live performances and participatory workshops tracing the roots of contemporary black dance through American and Caribbean traditions back to Africa.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoston is so segregated,\u201d says Mckersin of Laka\u00ef Dance Theatre, who founded the festival with Baindu Conte-Coomber and Marianne Harkless Diabate, who perform in Harkless Diabate\u2019s troupe Benkadi Drum & Dance. Clubs here often decline to host hip-hop shows because they believe \u201cit will incite violence.\u201d Mckersin says, \u201cBoston is terrified of the culture. \u2026 I want people to learn of our culture, to realize it\u2019s not what you think it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

A general admission performance opens the festival on Friday, Oct. 19, 2018, at 8 p.m., at Roxbury Community College. Then dance workshops (\u201cmaster classes for all levels of dancers and students\u201d) will be offered on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 20 and 21, at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlack history is encoded in music and dance and a lot of people don\u2019t know that,\u201d Mckersin says. \u201cPre- and post-slavery most of us were not taught to read and write, so messages were encoded in music and dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The 2017 Racines Black Dance Festival. (Maria Fonseca)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Friday night\u2019s show<\/a> is meant to be a sort of chronological history of dance from African roots to today. Joh Camara performs Malian dance. Mouminatou Camara dances Guinean style. Pape N\u2019Diaye and Paa Seck Diery dance sabar from Senegal.<\/p>\n

Caribbean dances come in as Isaura Oliveira dances Brazilian orixa, Jorge Arce performs Puerto Rican bomba, Yesenia Fernandez-Selier dances Cuban rhumba, and Peniel Guerrier performs Haitian styles.<\/p>\n

In the United States, slaves were forbidden drums, so Mckersin says, \u201cwe start using our feet to make the rhythm and our hands.\u201d This lead to tap, as performed here by Khalid Hill. Junious Lee Brickhouse performs Piedmont blues.<\/p>\n

Moncell Durden demonstrates social dances from the 1950s to \u201880s. The Beantown Lockers, King Aus, Ivan “Heat Rock” Cofield, James \u201cCricket\u201d Colter and TweetBoogie perform hip hop styles from breaking and house to locking and waacking.<\/p>\n

Henry \u201cLeSheriff\u201d Nsang performs Afrobeat dance, which \u201ctook traditional African rhythms and then they put it through electronics. \u2026 A lot more bass, a lot more pop to it,\u201d Mckersin says. \u201cIt was a mix of both worlds, our black culture in America and the culture in Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just showing the lineage of how we got to today as people,\u201d Mckersin says, \u201cbut through music and dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"The<\/a>
The Beantown Lockers perform at the 2017 Racines Black Dance Festival. (Maria Fonseca)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI wanted to start this festival because Boston has this lack of education about people of color even though we constitute a huge majority of the population,\u201d the Boston dancer and choreographer Mckersin says of the Racines Black Dance Festival, which arrives next week for its second year. The title \u201cracines\u201d means \u201croots\u201d\u2014and that\u2019s what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[212,110],"tags":[451,450,87,449],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8946"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8959,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946\/revisions\/8959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}