MELT – We Got Soul: Improvising While Black as Movement Practice

This workshop will explore mayfield's ongoing dance practice and project "Improvising While Black/IWB" using voice/body, somatics, contemporary dance, contact improvisation, afropessimist theory and practices specifically from mayfield's upbringing in the pentecostal church. mayfield queers "praise dance" by using speaking in tongues, trembling, catching spirit, as secular collective worship--participants investigate movement that moves the soulful body. There is an awareness of ancestors, ancestral land and an interplay with what the body remembers and forgets. We witness each other! There is play, dynamic partnering, deep belly laughter, wandering, reading, writing, questioning, critiquing, seeking, democratizing, deconstructing, and whatever else we find in the wildness of improvisation.