Tawanda Chabikwa is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose work revolves around Black and Africana dance practices, artificial intelligence, African indigenous knowledges, practice-based research, and creative collaboration. Current research and creative practice investigate the choreographic practices of transnational African artists, as well as the application of AI and machine learning modalities in/for Black lifeworlds, Africana cosmologies and philosophy, decolonial pedagogies, and embodied research methodologies. He holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic, an M.F.A. in Dance from Southern Methodist University, and works with storytelling, performance art, and visual art (most recent exhibitions includes El Paso’s Zephyr Gallery, Nova Gallery, and JMM Fusion Gallery Spaces) and creative writing (first novel Baobabs in Heaven published in 2010). Tawanda holds a doctorate in Africana Studies from the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, working in both the Theater & Dance department and the African American Studies program. Tawanda’s interdisciplinary scholarly and creative endeavors have led to collaborative encounters, including think-tank initiatives, educational practice, performance installations, and visual art exhibitions.

Workshop: Ritual-iD w/ Tawanda Chabikwa

Dance can be used in the service of transformation, contemplation, and healing. Dance is a practice that cultivates self-knowledge. There is wisdom within our bodily capacity for sensation, and this wisdom is unleashed when we are active, present, and engaged in/through rhythm and breath. This workshop centers on three principles: Intention, Awareness, and Intimacy. We will explore through improvisation the existential and aesthetic work of dance, and what dance does. How does movement move us into new cognitive directions and new relationships to ourselves and others? How does it transform our memory, senses, and self-concepts into resources for personal growth and healing? What new aesthetic possibilities emerge for us as dancers when we give ourselves over in processes of shared vulnerability while traversing our internal geographies? What does it mean to allow your heart to dance? Our encounter will draw from a combination of improvisational methods that include mhande rhythmic structures from the Karanga peoples of Zimbabwe, divine choreographies of Braziliancandomblé, fundamentals of physical theater technique, along with the inflections of various martial arts and meditative practices. The workshop is an opportunity to shed “all the things we have cemented to our identities” and discover anew the deep structure of embodied knowledge available to us always.

*Ritual-iD is a dance pedagogy, composition, and improvisation method that is in ongoing development by Tawanda Chabikwa. The method focuses on cultivating positive relationships between self-concept and soma-sensory information in movers. This ritual-inspired process is modeled upon a concentric understanding of relationship/relationality that extends infinitely in both inward and outward directions.