Amistad Research Center partners with Black Dance Stories to archive digital content

21st February 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

A new partnership between the Amistad Research Center and a Black dance organization will help preserve and promote the stories that Black artists tell through body movement and performance.

Earlier this month, Amistad announced the collaboration with Black Dance Stories, a YouTube series founded in 2020 that has produced more than 45 YouTube episodes featuring the work of more than 80 dancers, choreographers and movement artists.

Black Dance Stories was created as a way for Black dancers and other creatives to discuss, explore and interpret the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, and to connect with the Black Lives Matter effort and the issues that that nationwide movement for social justice has raised.

The dance collaborative strives to strengthen the African diaspora community and foster discussion of societal, historical and personal issues through expressive movement.

Under the new partnership, the Amistad Research Center will archive and safeguard Black Dance Stories’ digital content and make the videos more accessible to the public.

The Amistad Research Center, which is located on the Tulane University campus, is one of the country’s largest repositories of the historical records, documents and artistry of the African diaspora. The collection preserves a century and a half of the struggle for civil rights and equality.

Those involved with the new partnership between Amistad and Black Dance Stories say the joint effort focuses on the ideas of collaboration and conversation within the community.

“Friendship and supporting the community is really what this collaboration is all about,” said Black Dance Stories co-creator Charmaine Warren.

Warren said her organization strives to support and nurture the Black dance community and the artists involved in it, a cultural pride that drives what the series does, including the new partnership. “Everywhere we go, we want to hold up the Black forward-thinking community, and working with Amistad just makes so much sense,” she said.

She added that archiving the series’ videos will make them more secure than they could be just on YouTube, and Black Dance Stories contributors wanted to take advantage of the relatively new process of visual archiving.

Amistad executive director Kara Tucina Olidge said the collaboration with Black Dance Stories meshes well with the research center’s mission of collecting the rich history of the African-American community.

Olidge said Amistad recognizes and responds to “the need to document what’s happening around us, and in the Civil Rights Movement.”

That involves representations and expressions of Black art, she said, adding that the center has always strived to collect the artistic efforts of people of color, many of whom have told their own personal stories through body movement.

“[Artistic works] have been critical to the Civil Rights Movement,” Olidge said. “We’ve always had this [artistic community] that has played a central role in our liberation movement.”

Warren and Olidge said that the new collaboration was forged by the work of Olga Garay-English, the executive director of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and visionary artistic leader Colleen Jennings-Roggensack.

Warren and Olidge said that the trailblazing archival project couldn’t have happened without the pair. In a press release, Garay-English called the Amistad-Black Dance Stories “a match made in heaven,” adding that she knew that Warren and Olidge should connect because of the two organizations’ shared goals of cultural preservation and presentation.

“I knew it was kismet [and] the two of them should meet,” Garay-English said.

In the press release, Jennings-Roggensack called Black Dance Stories a “national treasure,” and with the new partnership, the dance series “will be made available to students, young artists, educators, writers, historians and all people around the globe.”

Warren told The Louisiana Weekly that the archiving process has already begun, an effort she hopes will preserve not only the dance organization’s visual record, but also its legacy.

“This is an effort to keep Black Dance Stories going long after we’re gone,” she said.

Olidge added that the Amistad collaboration with Black Dance Stories “is about documenting [artists’] legacies, but also moving forward the ideas of Black Dance and choreography.”

“This project really represents the collaborative spirit,” she added, “and it shows how people from diverse backgrounds can come together on a project like this and make sure the art is available for generations to come.”

This article originally published in the February 21, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.