Co-Choreography: Black Feminist Practice of Collective Freedom Dreaming

In this interactive Brown Bag, Shamell Bell introduces co-choreography as a Black feminist practice that bridges scholarship, artistic practice, and community organizing. Drawing on bell hooks' vision of education as the practice of freedom and Black feminist thought, Bell introduces co-choreography as a tool for dance, performance, and activism and guides participants through affirmations, somatic meditation, and Collective Freedom Dreaming. By moving between conversation and embodied practice, participants will leave with a new framework for understanding dance as both a creative practice and a method for social transformation.

—--------

Bell founded Street Dance Activism and Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation. A mother, movement artist, scholar, documentary filmmaker, visionary cultural strategist, and Emmy-nominated producer, her work lives at the intersection of Black feminist theory, Black radical imagination, and embodied activism. She earned her PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and recently taught Somatic Practices and Global Performance in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University. Her research centers Black street dance as a practice of collective freedom. Whether in classrooms, community spaces, or public performance, she invites participants to think with their bodies and rehearse more liberated ways of being together. She served as supervising producer on the Emmy-nominated series Lessons in Chemistry and is co–social impact director, alongside Ms. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, for Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Resist. She also holds weekly embodied healing spaces with Rev. Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant, for families impacted by state violence.