Radical Research:
Luna invests in dance research as a way to advance our field. We also investigate what dance research can be, who shares it, who has access to it, and how it can be presented. Our free, virtual Radical Research panel presentation will be on Saturday, May 31, 2025, 2:45pm-5pm (PT). The program will feature the alternative and multi-faceted artistic approaches among four distinguished BIPOC dance practitioners, Gerald Casel, Tammy Johnson, Bobi Lott, and Māhealani Uchiyama. Radical Research highlights the legitimate and rigorous inquiry of BIPOC artists, whose experiences are often neglected by traditional institutions of research and education, and amplifies the diverse ways embodied research can be conducted through dance creativity.
According to Co-Executive Director, Patricia Reedy, “Artists, like scientists, approach their work from a place of inquiry. Sometimes the research question is fully formed, but more often curiosity spurs intuition that leads to discovery through rigorous creative practice.”
Panelists
Gerald's Research:
Dancing Around Race, which focuses on systemic racial inequity, aims to bring out the truth and unearth deeper questions and understandings around inclusion, belonging, and access. In particular, my work looks at how intersectional identities cannot be occluded in the research, community gatherings, performance spaces, and in the teaching of dance. Buddhist philosophy frameworks help lay the foundation into practices grounded in vulnerability and courage.
Gerald Casel
Gerald Casel is a “Bessie” and “Izzie” award winning dance artist, administrator, and educator. As director of GERALDCASELDANCE, their choreographic work explores questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is Professor and Chair of the Dance Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Tammy's Research:
For twenty years Johnson has specialized in raks baladi, also known as Egyptian style belly dance. As a member of the Black Spirt Dance Collective, Johnson is dedicated to using the arts and ritual to support Black communities to have enough safety to understand their relationship to chronic illness and disability, whether personal or within their communities. The Oakland, California based Johnson embraces work that allows her to make good on her life’s purpose of being a happy Black woman.
Tammy Johnson
Tammy Johnson is dancer, writer, cultural strategist, somatic coach, and godmother extraordinaire. As a community organizer in Milwaukee, WI, Johnson directed living wage, welfare rights, public education, and election campaigns. She spent a decade at Race Forward as a national organizer, trainer, writer, and policy analyst. Johnson also co-produced the television special, Colorlines: Race and Economic Recovery, with LinkTV. In 2021, Johnson curated creativesinplace.org, a listening project and digital platform that features the stores of Bay Area artists and their work. In 2024, Tammy joined InAdvance, a group that focuses on resuscitating the heart of community organizing.
Bobi's Research:
My thesis is about what it means to decolonize my body using land as a healing tool. My final performance project is to create a healing ritual performance that will be performed and recorded at several unmarked burial grounds and other significant site-specific locations as a dance film. How I choose to decolonize my body in dance using healing practices from familial customs, storytelling, interviews, the Katherine Dunham Dance Technique, and various somatic practices determined my choreographic process.
Bobi Lott
Bobi Lott, of South Central Los Angeles, is a proud educator, dancer, anthropologist, world traveler, and believer that dance transforms lives. Her dance career began as a ballerina of Leimert Park’s Dance Wonderland. She was trained in classical ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dance under the direction of Carolyn Skyers and Karen McDonald. In 1999, Bobi was introduced to the Katherine Dunham Dance Technique by Alicia Pierce, with whom she first traveled to East St. Louis, IL, to attend the International Dunham Dance Technique Seminar. Bobi is currently a Katherine Dunham freelance researcher studying the technique under the tutelage of Ruby Streate. Bobi explores Dunham’s movement system using the vocabulary of somatic practices.
Māhealani's Research:
Author of Haumāna Hula Handbook for Students of Hawaiian Dance and The Mbira, An African Musical Tradition, and a producer of traditional Hawaiian and Tahitian music, Māhealani is currently using her unique perspective as a lineally recognized Kumu Hula and one of (possibly the only) Kumu Hula of African descent to inform her next recording project, Pōpolohiwa: Songs of Resilience and Joy, supported by the Gerbode and Kenneth Rainin Foundations and the NEA.
Māhealani Uchiyama
Māhealani Uchiyama is an award-winning dancer, musician, composer, choreographer, recording artist, author, and teacher. She is the founder and director of the Māhea Uchiyama Center for International Dance in Berkeley and is Kumu Hula of Hālau KaUaTuahine. She is the creator and director of the Kāpili Polynesian Dance and Music Workshops, and the African American Mbira Project. She holds a BA in Dance Ethnology and an MA in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi. She trained in traditional hula and Tahitian ʻori under the late Kumu Hula (hula master) Joseph Kamōha’i Kahā’ulelio. Ms. Uchiyama is one of very few widely recognized Kumu Hula of African descent.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.
