This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.

Before colonialism, Gbe women enjoyed a social status on par with men. However, there has been a shift in the postcolonial social structure of Gbe societies. Modern capitalism, which accompanied colonial structures, privileged men, eroding many woman-empowering practices. This article examines Ogu women’s marginality through an ethnographic study of gangbe (a musical genre exclusive to married Ogu women). I argue that the sources of Ogu women’s marginality are interlocking, involving oppression stemming from colonial structures and the values of contiguous Yorùbá people. I propose a collaborative intervention that upends typical power structures that privilege Western and Yorùbá ideation over Indigenous Ogu knowledge, values, and practices.

In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.

In 2019, Chile’s artistic collective Las Tesis staged the viral feminist performance “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path), as a popular protest against Sebastián Piñera’s government. This article analyzes the geopolitical context behind Las Tesis, focusing on Chile’s 2019 events and the motivations behind the performance in Valparaíso. Subsequently, I explore the performance’s structure and lyrics as a form of artivism, emphasizing its impact. The third section of this article will be dedicated to exploring the linguistic and musical adaptations of the same performance undertaken by various women’s collectives, associations, or informal groups across the globe.

Whereas students in China can take Chinese instrument training in a variety of settings, Canada has no systematized structure of Chinese music education. Indeed, little scholarly attention has been paid to the development of Chinese instrumental music education in the Chinese diaspora within North America. Based on extensive fieldwork in Toronto, I address the following questions in this article: How do Chinese immigrants pass down their music? How and where do students take Chinese instrument training? How have the methods of transmission evolved? And how do Chinese instrument pedagogical techniques bridge Chinese and Canadian contexts?

Through an ecological approach to creative practice (henceforth ecomprovisation), this project deals with the expansion of creative strategies applicable to everyday contexts. Within ubiquitous music (ubimus), we target the convergence of sonification methods with the application of ecological models within the context of comprovisation. These conceptual frameworks inform the technological and aesthetic approaches applied in the making of Markarian 335. We describe the creative procedures and the implications of the design choices involved in this artwork. The contributions and shortcomings of our ecomprovisational approach are situated within the context of the current efforts to foster expanded creative possibilities in ubimus endeavours.