Blog

We are now a Community Interest Company (CIC)!

We have really exciting news! After years of discussion and months of work, PoPMoves is now registered as a Community Interest Company (CIC). This means we can now operate as a legal entity and develop a model that is financially sustainable in the long...

Thank you, Clare.

As Clare Parfitt transitions out of the role, we reflect on her tenure as Chair of the UK node. Clare has been central to the development of PoP Moves from its inception as Popular Dance and Music Matters in 2007. Following a longstanding role...

Looking forward from within the pandemic

Dear PoP Movers, The global pandemic has affected us all in a myriad of ways, and we are aware that those of you who learn, perform, teach and produce popular dance will have been affected deeply by lockdown and social distancing protocols. I would...
A dancer performing a hip-hop freeze

Late Learning In Popular Dance

I turned 49 two days ago and in many ways I feel nothing like a 49-year old. Yet I've started learning a new dance form and it makes me feel distinctly middle-aged...

What My Body Knows* – “Being Stuck on Popular (Screen) Dance”

On the heels of Joanna Hall’s excellent and thoughtful blog post from last week and with the anticipation of my upcoming blog post this week, I have been reflecting a lot on the question of writing about popular dance: how, why, and most importantly...

We are stronger together…

In this blog I seek to open up questions about the process of researching and writing about popular dances. In particular, I encourage the reader to {re}consider the role of the writer, the personal, and the associated paradigms of authority, objectivity, authenticity, inclusion and...

Popular Dance Education and “The Fits”

I just read a review of a new dance film called The Fits, that is a lovely departure from  what we have come to expect from North American dance films in recent decades. Not only does it center around a young African American girl’s...
Spouting plant

Dance as ‘care of the self’ in the academy

At the ‘PoP Moves Seedbed: Dancing Methodologies’ symposium on Saturday I had a 90-minute curated conversation with Kélina Gotman (Kings College London) about historical methodologies in popular dance research.  Our conversation ranged across the materiality of archival documents, the partiality of ‘the archive’, expertise...

“Demimondes and Dance Worlds,” Julie Malnig

I am teaching a course this semester, for the second time, called Demimondes and Dance Worlds, a team-taught, graduate-level course with Professor Deborah Kapchan. She teaches in the Dept. of Performance Studies and I in the Gallatin School at NYU, This social-dance based seminar...
Afro dance

Dancing the Francophone Postcolony on YouTube

This semester I am teaching a course called Dance in Global Contexts, a general education class for non-majors. In the first week I tried to introduce some of the larger ideas and skill sets that will carry out through the term. We talked particularly...

She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body — November 2015

PoP Moves member Dr Melissa Blanco Borelli’s new book She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (Oxford University Press)  is scheduled for release on 7 November 2015. Here is what you will read on its back cover. “This triumphant offering invigorates dance scholarship...
Craig Revel Horwood

Another whirl around the dance floor

This week, BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing (the U.K. version of ‘Dancing with the Stars’) began to reveal its series 13 line-up (so far we have a radio presenter, a soap star and a celebrity chef). This seems like the perfect opportunity to reflect...

Virtually there… watching, sharing and remembering the International Dancehall Queen Competition online

PoP Moves committee member Celena Monteiro is working towards a PhD focused on transnational dancehall queen culture, in particular the contemporary relationship between European and Jamaican queens and the various dancehall ‘sites’, both virtual and concrete. Last year Monteiro travelled to Jamaica to conduct...
A flash mob at Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille

I feel like dancing…

I first became interested in dance flash mobs when I saw Colleen Dunagan (Associate Professor of Dance at California State University, Long Beach) give a presentation discussing the Black Eyed Peas and Oprah Winfrey ‘I Gotta Feeling’ flash mob of 2009.  In this powerfully...

Pop Moves co-founder Mary Fogarty at KISMIF conference

PoP Moves co-founder Professor Mary Fogarty was an invited Keynote speaker at the international conference, KISMIF (Keep It Simple! Make It Fast!) in Porto, Portugal on July 16th 2015. Also for the KISMIF conference, Mary Fogarty and Helen Simard created two intervention performances, “Sharon and Tracy...
A Prancing Elites dancer

PoP Moves Board Member Quoted in NY Times

Takiyah Nur Amin,  from PoP MOVES, was recently quoted in The New York Times in an article about J-Setting, a popular dance form with roots in black culture and the American south. The article highlights the Prancing Elites, an all -male J-Setting group that has...
Bboy performing a floor move

Life Lessons in Hip Hop

Professor Sherril Dodds from PoP MOVES, in collaboration with b-boys Steve “Steve Believe” Lunger and Mark “Metal” Wong, Co-Directors of Hip Hop Fundamentals, have initiated a new research project called “Life Lessons in Hip Hop”. The project focuses on on Temple Bboys, a student-led organization...
Plenary panel discussion

Dancing (trans)national memories symposium

On Saturday 20th June 2015, the first symposium for the Dancing with Memory project, titled ‘Dancing (trans)national memories’, took place at Senate House, University of London, supported by PoP MOVES. Dancing with Memory is an AHRC-funded project to investigate the relationship between popular dance and cultural...