Kinethic California

Front matter

DANCING FUNK & DISCO ERA KINSHIPS

NAOMI MACALALAD BRAGIN

Studies in Dance: Theories and Practices

Contents

Vignette Damita’s Solo Flight

INTRODUCTION Historical Background Funk X Disco Hip Hop Dance X Streetdance Kinethics Methodology Chapter Map Streetdance Stories

A Note on Language

Introduction

Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships looks to forms of social and vernacular dance, blooming in 1960s and 1970s California, that organize dancers in rhythm, embedding them in local cultural histories of place while connecting them to an emergent global contemporary culture of hip hop/streetdance.! I name their collective movement practices kinethic to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss. As dancers engage kinethics, they reinvent gestural vocabularies that describe worlds they imagine into knowing-being.

Historical Background

Funk and disco era California dancing demonstrates a dynamic fluidity of stylistic boundaries, reflective of dancers’ travels within and across neighborhoods, cities, and regions. By way of everyday people’s movements of migration and dislocation, physical and imaginative wandering, vernacular dances trace circuitous routes, emerge from multiple centers, and proliferate in reinvented forms. The cultural histories of these dances challenge singular and linear origin narratives—an explosion of vernacular dancing interanimates locations touching Northern California’s Bay Area cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond, the Central Valley city of Fresno, and, in the south, the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Watts, Compton, Baldwin Hills, and Leimert Park. In the north, dances were emerging in Sacramento and San Jose. In the south, dancers were traveling out to Orange County, Long Beach, and the San Fernando Valley. Connecting boogaloo style to popular dances of the 1960s and ‘70s, Oakland dancer and cultural worker Traci Bartlow rejoins, “It was a collective consciousness of blackness. It’s something that came out of our black experience. It feels like it was all around the same time of black folks in California, on the West Coast, that had this style come out of them.”* The California dances to which I turn have shaped global contemporary dance, spanning transnational competitions, battles and dance festivals, popular film and TV dance reality shows, TikTok and YouTube viral videos, private studio classes, university curricula, underground clubs and neighborhood gatherings.

New York is the birthplace of hip hop culture, yet dancers and scholars alike have noted its long-standing vital entanglement with California dance cultures. Widely respected hip hop dancers who research these histories have consistently acknowledged links between California and New York. Steffan Mr. Wiggles Clemente writes, “East Coast Hip Hop dancers met the West Coast Street Style dancers and exchanged styles. California had dances like POPPING and LOCKING. With this exchange came the acceptance of POPPING and LOCKING into Hip Hop dance.” Practitioner Jorge Popmaster Fabel Pabon asserts: “In order to properly report the history of hip-hop dance forms, one must journey both inside and outside of New York City. Although dance forms associated with hip-hop did develop in New York City, half of them (i.e. popping and locking) originated and developed on the west coast as part of a different cultural movement.”* In his 1986 essay “Hip Hop 101,” historian and cultural anthropologist Robert Farris Thompson similarly noted, “Hip hop is a tale of three cities. As I’ve said, breakdancing and the hip hop sound emerged in the Bronx, electric-boogaloo poppin’ and tickin’ moves arose in Fresno and Los Angeles (Watts, Long Beach, Crenshaw Heights).”5

While these statements connect the styles of hip hop, breaking, popping, and locking, as well as New York and Central and Southern California, dancers have also argued for inclusion of dance histories situated in Northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area, citing styles of Oakland

Boogaloo, San Francisco Strutting, and Richmond Robotting.® The naming of dances for cities, neighborhoods, and areas is a familiar act of recognition by which dancers become embedded in place as a shared sociality and felt sense of being and belonging in movement. The Bay’s distance from Los Angeles in the south (seven hours’ drive) meant a whole network of local dance cultures could thrive without the direct impact of the Hollywood entertainment industrial complex. The influence of Bay Area dance histories on global hip hop/streetdance culture is still not widely narrated.’

To further complicate this mess of origins, Clemente makes the critical point that two popular films of 1984, Breakin’ and Beat Street, “helped catapult Hip Hop to the mainstream audience.”* New York Breaking appears alongside California Popping and Locking styles in Breakin’ (filmed in California) and Beat Street (filmed in New York). One year earlier, popping appears alongside breaking in 1983’s Flashdance, filmed in New York. In fact, popping (originally known among New York dancers as electric boogie) and locking appear in the underground hip hop classic Wild Style, a month before Flashdance was released. Waacking/punking, a style emerging in Los Angeles’s first gay discos, makes fleeting appearances in Breakin’ and its sequel, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.’ While California dances were misrepresented as “breakdancing,” a misnomer that circulated widely in mass media, the 1980s is nevertheless a key period in which the cultural kinship of styles becomes evident in mainstream media. 1°

Dancers in New York who were watching Soul Train and traveling themselves across regional, state, and national lines, were experimenting with movements innovated by California dancers, contributing to the growth of California styles alongside East Coast styles of breaking, rocking, and hip hop. As media representation continues to shape mainstream misconceptions of hip hop dance forms and histories, I attune to dancers’ own intramural practices of affiliation, through which dances are born and reborn.

Dance lineages are not preconceived or immutable. They take shape and shift through dancers’ practices of affiliation. During the early 1970s, the interrelated forms of breaking and rocking emerged in New York as dancers innovated styles that would become foundations of hip hop dance. With increasing mainstream media representation in the early 1980s, California street styles of popping and locking were embraced among dancers as dance kin of hip hop, while New York dancers were simultaneously birthing hip hop’s golden era party dances like the Dougie, Running Man, Cabbage Patch, Reebok, and more. Acknowledging these cross-cultural translocations allows for more nuanced and dynamic conversations between dancers that don’t reinscribe immobility and cultural stasis onto minoritized communities. What I am saying is that dance styles were in conversation because dancers were in conversation; they were not/are not producing culture in isolation.

Funk X Disco

Both funk and disco music were innovated as artists profusely mixed earlier genres, shaping forms with a dance orientation and an immersive sonic-kinetic feel. Funk artists, historiographer Tim Lawrence writes, “were more interested in generating a concentrated and constant rhythmic riff than a variable and undulating emotional journey.”!! Describing the emergence of funk in the late 1960s and early 1970s, music historian Rickey Vincent writes that live band artists—among them James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic, and Bootsy Collins—were “breaking formalized styles and generating a synthesis” of elements, mixing soul, R & B, gospel, rock, jazz, and blues. Funk music’s driving, dance-oriented feel, Vincent explains, centered rhythmic syncopation, sustained by collective improvisation among all members of the band. The genre brought a new focus to bass and electric guitarists, Tony Bolden writes, ensuing from “James Brown’s rhythmic innovations [where] the drummer emphasized the first beat in a four-bar measure— generally known as the ‘One.’”!3 By sustaining a pulsing anticipatory groove, the One supports funk’s experiences of sensory immersion. Beyond musical genre, Bolden further emphasizes the spiritual element and “psychosomatic construct known as funk . . .as an alternative form of rationality.” “ LaMonda Horton-Stallings goes further to assert that funk is a practice of the erotic specific to black sexual cultures, examining it “as nonreproductive sex and transaesthetics of cultural art forms.” 15

While funk has widely been positioned in opposition to disco, Tavia Nyong’o nuances the politics of genre boundary keeping: “The unhappy hybridity of disco is still evinced in the uneasy status of its foremost cultural avatars—the Bee Gees and John Travolta, playing Tony Manero— white men occupying vocal registers and striking choreographic poses that usurp the disco diva and the gay man while at the same time infringing upon, even denaturing, the very white masculinity that such a colonizing move is supposed to secure.” 16 Lawrence concurs, stating that “all sorts of protagonists had all sorts of problems with this highly politicized genre,” which let go of the live band to focus on the producer and DJ’s artistry, bringing extended dance tracks to the floors of new urban discotheques and underground parties alike. 17

Early 1970s disco emerged from soul, funk, and jazz blendings, notable in Detroit Motown recordings of “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” by the Undisputed Truth and the Temptations, Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft,” and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music.” Foundational to disco’s development as a genre was the distinct sound shaped by Philadelphia producers like Gamble and Huff and extended by the New York-based Salsoul Records. Lawrence traces the disco beat to early innovations of the Philadelphia trio of musicians known as Baker-Harris-Young, soon brought to public attention by black entertainment entrepreneur Don Cornelius, who requested that Gamble and Huff create the theme song for his newly syndicated TV show Soul Train.'* The result was the 1974 chart-topping hit “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” by Mother Father Sister Brother (MFSB).?°

Troubling a potentially utopian division between early disco and an increasingly technologically mediated sound, Nyong’o hears a “genealogy of afrofuturism” in the musical range of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” which he emphasizes “is the quintessential recording of a modulated aim, layering the sonic emblem of the ‘disco diva’ into a pulsating dance-floor scorcher built entirely out of the ‘artifice’ of synthesized sounds.”*° Disco innovated “a feeling-tone between the live and mediated,” which, Nyong’o notes, immediately triggered a range of emotional responses, shaping an ambivalent politics of emerging dance music cultures.”? Funk and disco genres emerged relationally, in ways that challenge conceptual hierarchies of live over mediated sound. Going beyond musical genre to consider psychosomatic aspects of funk and disco aesthetics, I follow the work of Nyong’o, Bolden, and Stallings, to articulate the ways 1970s dance music cultures continue to shape global contemporary hip hop/streetdance.

Hip Hop Dance X Streetdance

Hip hop, popping, locking, breaking, bonebreaking, boogaloo, strutting, turfing, tuttin’, tickin’, snaking, vibing, animating, robotting, gangsta walkin’, jackin’, jookin’, jerkin’, jittin’, waacking, punking, voguing, house, lite feet, footwork, beat your feet (and on and on). Black vernacular style stays prolific, continuously reinventing self-described labels, unsettling predictable categories and wild styling genres. Style names are action oriented, giving instructions for how to move: poppers’ muscles contract and explode; lockers’ limbs click into place at the joints; waackers’ arms strike out, cut through, stir up air.?? Brenda Dixon Gottschild identifies this key principle of the Africanist aesthetic: “The movement of the action—is as important as getting it done, the static fact of the result or product.”

Umbrella uses of hip hop and streetdance are fraught. When I started writing this book, I was more convinced the terms were capacious enough to hold a body of wildly diverse styles and distinct cultural histories of dances emanating from Northern, Central, and Southern California, Chicago, and New York, among countless other areas. As my writing went deeper, I wondered about the helpfulness of both terms as umbrella references, knowing that hip hop, beyond its origins in Black and Latinx youth subcultures of 1970s and 1980s New York, continues to be used by mainstream media as a blanket term and by marketing industries as a brand. Similarly, streetdance comes specifically from a Los Angeles context associated with tensions between the entertainment industry and cultural styles that emerged from free-form social dancing in everyday spaces. I feel ambivalent toward the terms yet also understand their significance for articulating the interanimations of dancers’ diverse cultural histories that this book studies.

As an umbrella term related to hip hop, streetdance is reflective less of a fixed collection of styles than of historical tensions between black vernacular and white establishment dance. Streetdancer James OG Skeeter Rabbit Higgins recalls that in 1970s Los Angeles, the label was used by entertainment industry dealers and dancers alike to “differen[tiate] between what was taught in the studios and what was taught in the streets. At first, we weren't welcome in the studios, until we became of value.” Another dancer, Deputy, put it to me simply: “Locking was like dirt.”* In the Los Angelesspecific context, street marked practitioners’ ambivalent relations with (if not always total exclusion from) the Hollywood entertainment industry and white establishment dance.

The qualifier street became emphasized in dancers’ discourse as industry promoters played an increasingly significant role in their access to commercial stage opportunities.?° Streetdancers were hired as novelty entertainment acts (often recruited in local clubs via industry intermediaries). The first California dancers to perform and teach funk and disco era dances internationally had more consistent access to the professional dance and entertainment industry, either living in or traveling regularly to Los Angeles. The umbrella term streetdance became a reference point for the latest array of popular dances, improvised steps, and innovative movement expressions.

Yet within the everyday spaces of their schools, neighborhoods, and homes, they continued growing their cultural practices collectively and in artistic collaboration. This is to say, streetdance cannot be assumed a term of pure origin; rather, it was and is a discursive construction of practitioners’ entanglement with a media-arts-entertainment power structure and their shaping of a self-determined artistry distinct from dominant-culture institutions.

Within rap and hip hop’s subcultural value system, street is also a common marker of affiliation, signifying authenticity, credibility, rawness, realness, truth. In a contemporary context, street carries these inflections of hip hop authenticity and reflects the structural role of the US media-entertainment industrial complex in the global dissemination of dances that nonetheless maintain local histories that are culturally specific and distinct.

Streetdances have often been framed as “nontechnical” because methods of incorporating them into a dancer’s repertoire are not always linear. Moving beyond the studio, there’s often no regular schedule of classes to attend or predetermined levels of expertise to achieve. Practice time is open ended, woven intimately into the arbitrary time of everyday life: improvised in tight spaces of kitchens and living rooms; extended indefinitely through sleepless nights in bedrooms preparing for a talent show or club contest. Time is not bound to linear starting and ending points, nor is space delimited by studio walls or the proscenium theater stage. Practice can quickly turn to performance: jumping out the car to dance at a stoplight; gathering in a parking lot outside the after-hours club. Getting pushed before a crowd of adults at your momma’s house party. Studying the off-balance stroll of a peg leg man who frequents your neighborhood store. Watching your mom get down to a nasty groove in her kitchen. On the porch. In sweaty jooks. This ethos of study animates hip hop/streetdance vernaculars, which encompass the sociality of dancing within unpredictable, everyday life flows—a protean movement that tends to embrace complexity and resist generalization.

Anthea Kraut has highlighted an implicit bias in the study of dance technique in a European-derived worldview.*° Anthropologist Marcel Mauss expands a definition of “Techniques of the Body” to include everyday movements like walking and eating that “generate knowledge” through cultural tradition and social practice: “Learning and doing techniques takes place in a collective context; a context which forms and informs the social constitution of its practitioners.”?’ In a similar vein, Marya McQuirter theorizes Malcolm X’s autobiographical recounting “of moving from awkwardness to ballroom accomplishment,” in order to flag a dearth of attention to how people learn to dance outside of formal or professional contexts, an overlooking that denies the cultural labor of learning processes people create and continue outside of institutions.?* Streetdance involves collaborative and collective forms of creativity in contexts where boundaries blur between everyday life, artistic practice, study, and performance.

Streetdance techniques are deeply embedded in culture, and dancers access their philosophical principles as ways of moving through life. They play in unruly mixings of genre and persistent messiness of the vernacular. They refuse fixed location, traveling through streets, studios, stages, and cyberspaces. Street can describe geographic location, discursive space, ideology, political ontology. Street encompasses moving and being outside the studio, in ways that critique Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchy and white establishment dance.

Hip hop is now widely taught as a studio style, but the defining elements of hip hop technique are obscured by what's actually taught in any one hip hop class—appearing along a wide spectrum from freestyle movement to Broadway-style jazz dance. In tandem with vague definitions, the development of a choreo-centric model of transmission adjoins the dances’ move onto entertainment stages from the early 1970s, to the release of the first hip hop films in the early 1980s, and another explosion of commercial dance films, industry competitions, and dance reality television since the 2000s. Choreography is now the most widespread approach to teaching hip hop in the studio. This is not to argue that choreography is an essentially inauthentic or incorrect approach to hip hop practice. I am arguing instead for attention to the function of choreography in a market system that relies on reproducing codes of black cool as a commodity relation to be owned and traded.?°

The choreography/improvisation divide occupies a contentious space within hip hop/streetdance discourse, most evident in shifting labels arising over the last two decades that attempt to name performance practices as opposed to cultural-historical dances. Hip hop choreo, urban choreo, and lyrical choreo are terms that have gained traction with an increasing hybridization of dance styles. Though their usage and validity are contentious among practitioners, such terms more generally index the saturation of choreo-centric dancing in a neoliberal market driven by commodification of black culture and processes of professionalization.

Dance scholar Jonathan David Jackson’s foundational study “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing” is key here: “My discussion is founded on the notion that improvisation in the dancing must be understood as a particular kind of choreographing enacted within the ritual moment of the actions. Black vernacular dance aesthetics force us to rethink dualistic Platonic-Cartesian notions and the sometimes ethnocentric divisions between improvisation and so-called set choreography.” 3° Jackson’s work details the improvisatory creative processes that black vernacular dancers engage in as they pass movement principles on, showing that innovation and tradition are always becoming entangled—the “new” emerging simultaneously to the recycling (the renewing) of the “old.” Black aesthetics are sustained by black vernacular dancing’s improvisatory drive. This is consequential for studying the kinds of evolving dance practices I am here calling choreo-centric, as such practices continue to adapt, distort, and erase black aesthetics.

Competition is a particularly prevalent force that structures social relations in present-day dance practices. Dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster summarizes a competition-oriented experience of dance that circulates in contemporary private studios and is driven by the imperative of neoliberal globalization: “all genres are embraced as the product of human diversity and valorized for their unique aesthetic contributions, even as the underlying standards of excellence, most closely associated with balletic virtuosity, prevail as the generalized standards for evaluation.”*! The question of standards pertains directly to the advent and mass popularity of TV dance reality shows, where judging is an ocular-centric operation that subjects the vernacular to whitening-cleansing processes (e.g., the rule of clean lines, transitions, and timing). Foster further highlights the bourgeois humanist subjectivity on which the business of training and teaching is premised: “a self that is in mastery over the world, where different genres simply provide technical challenges that one must overcome.”*?

While highly choreographed unison group dancing has been characteristic of the studio and transnational team competition performance circuit, a parallel circuit of battle dancing (which also offers dancers opportunities to travel as judges and master teachers) centers a culture of improvisation-based performance in which soloists and crews compete. Battling is a core way of demonstrating authenticity within global hip hop/ streetdance culture, as Michele Byrd-Mcphee, director of dance organization Ladies of Hip Hop, suggests: “Anybody can do moves, it’s how you live in them, it’s how you feel in them, it’s how people can connect to whatever you're trying to share . . . [a]nd vulnerability can be a catalyst.”33 In battles, dance is placed into categories and judged by style: breaking, hip hop, popping, locking, vogue, and, more recently, waacking and hybrid categories like all-styles and experimental. There is also an instability inherent to classification systems, which require dancers’ ongoing assessment and evaluation of streetdance aesthetics. **

Contemporary dancers continue to use terms like street and urban to reference this cultural dance umbrella. I choose to avoid urban because of the ways the term circulates in political discourse as a euphemism for blackness.] find street to hold a critique of institutional power, as the term’s use continues to align with the unsettled language of the vernacular. My purpose is not to reproduce false divides between street, studio, and stage, but to consider how streetdance interanimates these paradigmatic spaces, creating a metacritique of the hierarchical division of space and ideologies of value that maintain it. Streetdance holds a critically unstable relationship with institutions of cultural production, especially in connection with ideas of privacy, ownership, individualism, and property. Even as they teach and train in studios and on concert stages, streetdancers still insist on a politics of authenticity that aligns their dancing with an ideology of the streets, destabilizing the presumed standard of white establishment dance.** The studio is an important center for the transmission of dancers’ embodied knowledge and dance histories. Yet Kinethic California decenters the studio as a historically privileged site of dance study to consider the multiply entangled places where dance training and study happen.

Streetdance affirms the informal, unprofessional study of dancing that remains unaccountable to linear methods of acquiring technique prevalent in a model of scheduled, level-based studio learning. The terminology continues to shift in response to changes in dancers’ informal and everyday practices. I recycle the term streetdance to underscore the labor of dancers who still maintain an ethics of connection to cultural histories and lived experience embedded in the dance.

Kinethics

I build a framework of kinethics to emphasize the reinventive drive of African American social and vernacular dances that activate networks of relation and belonging. Kinethics riff on the words kinetic, kinesthetic, kinship, ethic, and aesthetic, bringing attention to cultural practices of kinship formation that mobilize dancers to collectively innovate hip hop/ streetdance style. Kinethics define kinship as relationalities that are not premised on separability—the reduction of sociality to units premised on the individual. I am interested in collective movement practices that reorient dancers toward an ethic of kin relations, bearing on the ways dance styles emerge, interanimate, and transform.

Kinethics are inspired by Brazilian sociologist and political philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva's call for a decolonial praxis of “Black Feminist Poethics,” as she draws on the global social theory of Martiniquan philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant.* In his most widely known work, Poetics of Relation, Glissant departs from Western continental philosophy’s hold on thinking as a distant activity, practiced in isolation, instead looking to ways of thinking embedded in the materials of artistic traditions and produced by people creatively reinventing themselves as a practice of relation.*” Poetics and poethics allow me to study dance knowledges informing movement of a collective social body, situated in specific cultural contexts yet not rigidly rooted in monolithic communities of origin.

While Glissant’s reformulation of rhizomatic relations in conversation with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is a direct critique of root identity that would seem to negate a theory of kinship, I am interested in ways kinship systems are made through dance, including dancers’ creation of nonlinear lineages and nonbiological relations that emerge, move, shift, and transform. Kinethics bring attention to movement via routes traveled by dancers and dances across geographic, social, and cultural borders. Kinethics are rhizomatic not rooted, because they reorient dancers to practices of relationality in which multiplicity is inherent.

I am also thinking with Sylvia Wynter’s argument for an “ethics-aesthetic” theory of cultural practices as I elucidate principles of black social dancing that drive the reinvention of kinship bonds as dance lineages.** In “Sambos and Minstrels,” Wynter’s sole publication from her manuscript “Black Metamorphosis,” she argues that bourgeois humanist ethics are “born out of” relations of domination and reproduced through cultural performance to reinforce the ideology of normative white mastery and black exclusion.*? Ethical concepts form the seeds of the slave relation—contained within its aesthetic codes—such that hegemonic culture must keep reproducing antiblackness as an ethical stance.

Silva draws on Wynter’s work to assert that antiblackness does not require ethical justification; antiblackness creates humanism’s ethics. For

Silva, whiteness is secured by and through ethical indifference to black life.*° To indict this ethical relation, Wynter proposes that a “cultural process of INDIGENIZATION” arises from sustained acts of the enslaved to fashion a counterculture: “another collective identity whose coding and signification moved outside the framework of the dominant ideology .. . provides the basis for the theoretical formulations of the forms of revolution needed in America today.”*' Emerging through this cultural process of collective identity formation, black social dances offer ethics-aesthetic principles of practice that indict antiblackness.

Yet their forms are not unchanging. Dance scholar Anna Scott’s theory of “tenaxis” challenges the attempt to reduce blackness to a monolithic cultural identity, weighing dancers’ transcultural labor of tenaciously forming communities of practice that are interconnected through a material sense of place. Tenaxis differentiates dance as consumable product from dancing practices.** As dancers continue to reinvent black cultural forms into the present moment, tenaxis stores the codes of this indictment of antiblackness. The reinventive capacity of black social dancing, practiced in ethics-aesthetic principles of common rhythm sensing and improvisation, emerges in locally specific forms yet resists being bound to a static sense of position.

In “Rebellion/Invention/Groove,” Katherine McKittrick converses with “Black Metamorphosis” to excavate cultural forms that carry the historical imprint of enslavement and insurgency. Applying principles for moving (like the groove), black social dancers sustain an ethical drive to reinvent form:

Indeed, in sharing and grooving to music, histories are renarrated, kinships are reimagined, and a different mode of representation is performed, heard, repeated, enjoyed: this is a very different kind of initiation into humanness than a normative model that requires racial violence. .. . This opens up a meaningful way to think about how the politics of sound, and grooving to song, are assertions of black life that indict and subvert antiblackness and, at the same time, notice the inventive aspects of our collective and difficult plantocratic histories, traces, and memories: “The ethic is the aesthetic.”*%

Black social dancing’s reinventive ethos is what allows robot styles to pop up in many different locations, taking on the culturally specific textures of their places of (re)emergence without losing a larger sense of what Wynter calls their aesthetic kin-relatedness. The ethos embedded in principles of collective movement practice subverts ethics of white domination and continues to seed a black consciousness. This sense of relation fosters historical continuity and a collective sense of knowing-being-becoming in the midst of change.

An ethos of reinvention is present in Damita Jo Freeman’s 1973 Soul Train solo, as she activates a kinetic map of emergent dance lineages that will continue to be reinterpreted through collective movement practices of contemporary streetdancers in the 2000s. The work of dancers to name and organize these lineages is ongoing and contested. Yet reinvention of dance lineages gives continuity to dance histories and allows diverse dance communities to collectively participate in shaping these histories, even as the drive to be relevant (to resist stasis) spawns new dances.**

Black social dancing, specifically, shapes a collective sense of continuity and critically transformative possibility. The ethics-aesthetic principles carried in movement sustain the effort of a community reaching into the past to reinvent an ongoing present as a way to generate their emerging/becoming. These are neither idle fantasies nor, to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s wording, “innocent amusements”; instead, such practice “endeavors to redress and nurture the broken body; it is a becoming together dedicated to establishing other terms of sociality.’”*5 Black social dancing’s reinventive capacity allows dancers to adapt their movement in the moment—a practice that has always been of consequence for improvising black life under slavery and in its wake.*¢

Silva articulates the stakes of reinvented relations when she describes Black Feminist Poethics as a “radical praxis [that] acknowledges the creative capacity Blackness indexes, reclaims expropriated total value, and demands for nothing less than decolonization—that is, a reconstruction of the world, with the return of the total value without which capital would not have thrived and off of which it still lives.”4” Not reducible to money value alone, Black Feminist Poethics refuses the devaluation of social relations under racial capitalism. Kinethics, likewise, look to collective movement practices that reorient dancers’ sense of kin relations, taking part in a larger commitment to build a sociality of care and indebtedness that is not premised on terms of the individual and ownership.

I began wondering about an ethics of relation as I noticed how often dancers would honor their dead through oral storytelling and dance performance. Because so much of my work came down to listening to stories of dance elders, I began to be curious about the kinds of lineages dancers create. I often felt a deluge of dance spirits in their stories, an intimacy and relationality that I could feel growing within my dance elders. I especially began to realize these are dances of mourning. I’ve witnessed dancers interrupt a studio class to embody their dancestors, showing students the ways they moved. I’ve also listened to their stories about dancers disappearing and suddenly resurfacing in the dance world. I’ve been in spaces dedicated to the memory of passed dancers, where those gathered practice mourning by celebrating with others in movement. I noticed prevailing themes of family and obligation, especially in practices of naming the progenitors of dance styles.