Alexah is a postgraduate researcher at Birmingham City University whose research bridges contemporary dance and social sciences. Centralising the Black body, she explores how dance improvisation can reimagine Blackness beyond Eurocentric frameworks.
Drawing from her lived experience, Alexah's practice reclaims embodied ancestral knowledge and challenges narratives in contemporary dance. Here, she offers an insight into her research.
“My research reaches across the discourses of Contemporary Dance and Social Sciences, centralising the Black body as a site of interrogation and explorative landscape. The enquiry investigates how Blackness can be reimagined in dance improvisation, using improvised movement as a tool to access Black ancestral embodied knowledge.
Dance improvisation allows me to deepen the connection to my body in the moment of the doing, as such, I proactively attempt to disregard Eurocentric contemporary dance movement ideologies, whilst engaging with Black ancestral embodied knowledges. Doing this in the moment allows a full-bodied engagement, fostering an awareness of forgotten movement ideologies.
Reimagining Blackness is a decolonising practice whereby the aims of it are to gain agency and authorship over ones Blackness; through a refusal of the colonised lens, blackness can be transformational. Through practice, an opening is curated for the Black body to produce alternative histories, which can lead to a rewriting of previously prescribed scripting of the body.
Acts of decolonisation in contemporary dance
In contemporary dance, a racialised Eurocentric viewing of the body is still prevalent, resulting in Black movement knowledges to be lost and Black bodies to be considered wrong for their difference in body structure. The research forefronts Blackness in its entirety to challenge Eurocentric ideologies, removing said ideologies from the practice to centralise the research within Blackness itself.
The research forefronts how Eurocentric ideologies are perpetuated both in Contemporary dance and wider society, with the implications this has on Black bodies. As such, the practice offers new ways for Black bodies to exist, not just as an external act of resistance to physically living in the West, but also ways we can recalibrate our own view of self and how ones Blackness is navigated and displayed. I think this is especially important in the height of social media where we see Blackness portrayed in a limited number of ways, allowing for Blackness to be reimagined in the literal sense – how can we exist in ways outside of what the white world tells us we are? I believe this is a way in which small acts of decolonisation can occur.
Why this work matters
Through contemporary dance training, I have experienced an attempt to have my body forget my instinctual Blackness, forced into a system that made me believe my bodily structure needed to change to be “right”. As a young adult this became my motivation to invest in what my habitual movement was, which in turn created the research I am doing today. Further to this, my lived experiences of being a mixed Black female in the West, whilst also watching and experiencing how the West views and treats people of the global majority also feeds into why I think my research is so important.”
