Faculty lecture to focus on history of jazz dance, racism in the U.S.
McKillop Library will host another faculty lecture with Lindsay Guarino, associate professor and chair of the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance. Entitled “Whiteness and the Fractured Jazz Dance Continuum,” the lecture will explore how jazz dance, an indigenous American art form rooted in Black American people and culture, is often mislabeled and misunderstood.
The lecture will be held on Thursday, Oct. 6, from 4-5:30 p.m. on the first floor of McKillop Library. To register for the event, go here.
Guarino edited “Rooted Jazz Dance” that focus on the themes that will inspire her lecture.
Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States of America, Guarino will present the obscured story of how normalized Whiteness permeated the form so that today, performers and audiences alike participate unaware in misguided appropriation of artistic capital. To see jazz clearly, one must deconstruct historical narratives by considering who the storytellers have been, what biases may have been present, and what parts of the narrative were left behind.
To this end, Guarino will share her research on how Africanist aesthetics and cultural values are the bedrock of American jazz but have been historically devalued and systemically invisibilized. She will also provide specific examples of how and where jazz dance fractured from its Black American roots.
By tracing jazz from its roots in West Africa, to its origins in African American culture and to its myriad manifestations today, one can more clearly see how jazz both reflects and subverts American values and offers limitless potential for better understanding the complexity of American identity.
Guarino is an artist, educator and scholar. She has facilitated the dramatic growth of the dance program, including its new major focused in jazz studies. Guarino’s historical and embodied research interrogates the impacts of Whiteness on jazz history and practice through an antiracist lens, and investigates the intersections of jazz pedagogy, Africanist aesthetics, American history, identity and culture.
As an educator and a leader, Guarino prioritizes community at the heart of her practice and seeks to cultivate spaces where individuality is celebrated and recognized as vital to personal and collective growth.
The lecture will be held on Thursday, Oct. 6, from 4-5:30 p.m. on the first floor of McKillop Library. To register for the event, go here.
