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Cultural Workshop | Lecture – ‘When Dolls Dance’ with Makeda Thomas (Closed)

Host: Kieron Dwayne Sargeant Dance Foundation TT

Presents: Lecture – When Dolls Dance

Discipline: Dance, Mas/Carnival

Level: Intermediate-Advanced

Synopsis: “When Dolls Dance” examines the choreographies, embodied knowledges, and technologies of the Baby Doll masquerade, documented as being performed in Trinidad as early as 1885 and in Martinique’s Carnival of Saint-Pierre as early as 1888.

The research connects to the emergence of the Baby Dolls masquerade in New Orleans in 1912 out of Perdido-Gravier area of New Orleans, known as Black Storyville; its resurgences during the 1950’s and again, most recently, in the last decade. This chapter situates the work of the Trinidad & Tobago traditional mas band Belmont Baby Baby Dolls, particularly the band’s 2018 and 2019 Carnival performances – “Carnival Baby” and “Spirit Dolls”, respectively – in a Black radical feminist emancipatory praxis.

Furthermore, it posits how this “encoded masquerade”, as performed by Belmont Baby Dolls, subverts representations of black women and girls in the Caribbean. This performance tradition is highlighted as a healing modality for black women that motions to the connections, complexities and divergences in imagining radical Black feminist futures.

Date | Time:  Saturday 13th February, 2021 | 2:00PM – 3:30PM [AST]

Location: Online Zoom Session

Facilitator: Makeda  Thomas 

Makeda Thomas
Makeda Thomas

Makeda Thomas‘ artistic practice, scholarship and teaching are situated at the intersection of performance practice, diaspora theory, dance studies, ethnography and black feminisms. She has presented intermedia performances in relation to her scholarship internationally. Thomas’ work is published in Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice and in Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism. Thomas serves on the founding Board of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance.

Cost: 

  • $30 TTD / $5 USD – Trinidad & Tobago Participants
  • $5 USD – Caribbean Participants
  • $10 USD – International Participants

Key Dates:

  • Registration Begins: 2nd February 2021 | 2PM [AST]
  • Registration Ends: 13th  February 2021 | 11:30AM [AST]

CLCK HERE TO REGISTER

Workshop details submitted by: Kieron Sargeant

 

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