"Choreographing History: Black Concert Dance and the Question of Genre"

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our ninth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community - with complimentary wine and hors d'oeuvres. Free and open to the public.

This presentation asks if sentimentalism can be useful for contemporary black artists; if, as a set of aesthetic tactics, sentimentalism offers representational and experiential possibilities that usefully exceed or amend those canonized in black concert dance as the postmodern avant-garde. Nereson interprets choreographer Bill T. Jones's works about Abraham Lincoln as an aesthetic-political project of (re)inventing black womanhood that reveals the radical potential of the sentimental for black artists, whose participation in the public sphere of the arts remains circumscribed in tandem with ongoing US political disenfranchisement.