Assistant Professors Irvin Manuel Gonzalez and Alfonso Cervera developed Pachanga e Poder, a community-driven research incubator. The event brought together artists, activists, scholars, and dancers to investigate the multiple intersections within Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean social dance forms, analyzing social dance as social justice. The incubator hosted experimentations with aesthetics, sensibilities, ontologies, ecologies, and knowledges located in social dance forms that emerge from African and Latin American diasporas to consider how these intersections have emerged as and continue to foster tools for resistance, power, belonging, and justice. Between March 19-21, bodies convened to analyze and cite connections in social, folk, and spiritual dance forms from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, digitally archive artistic experimentations, and theorized the im/material spaces revealed in the practice of dancing. Invited artists/activists/scholars included Beatrice Capote, Alfonso Cervera, Dr. Colette Eloi, Carne Viva Dance Theatre (Chachi Pérez & Lazco), Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, Marina Magalhães, Jade Power-Sotomayor, Ohio State students, and more!
The incubator culminated with a public presentation on March 21 at 7:30pm in ACCAD’S Motion Lab located on the third floor of Sullivant Hall. This open community sharing invited participants to witness and share in the week’s findings, intersections, play and experimentations.
This event was funded by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Grant and the Ohio Hispanic Heritage Grant, with support from The Ohio State University Department of Dance, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, the Latinx Studies Program and the Center for Latin American Studies.
Photos by Lexi Clark-Stilianos
