Join the Modern & Contemporary Culture Workshop (Mo/Co) for their next workshop, featuring discussion of a chapter from Tara Aisha Willis’s manuscript “Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness."
The chapter discusses a 2018 improvised performance by seasoned choreographers and long-time peers Bebe Miller, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Ralph Lemon for which the author served as curator. Detailed description mingles with history, theory, and critically intimate memories of the curatorial and archival research processes, addressing the potential of practice to both generate and record more nuanced Black dance histories in the present moment.
Coffee and pastries will be served. Contact Professor Christa Noel Robbins for more information: cnr4b@virginia.edu.
Tara Aisha Willis, Ph.D. is a dance artist, scholar, and curator based between Chicago and Troy, NY. Her research centers Black living and experimentation in dance and performance practices and archives. Currently Curator of Dance & Theater at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media & Performing Art Center | EMPAC, she has previously held positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she initiated the Chicago Performs series, and Movement Research where she was founder of their Artists of Color Council.
She belongs to the “Bessie” Award-winning Skeleton Architecture improvisation collective and has performed in work by Will Rawls, Yanira Castro, Anna Sperber, Kim Brandt, devynn emory, and Paulina Olowska among others, and collaborated with Damon Locks, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Anna Martine Whitehead, Zachary Nicol, and Jasmine Hearn.
She has held research fellowships with the Getty Research Institute, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, University of Indiana-Bloomington, University of London, and Jacob’s Pillow. Published writings include liquid blackness, Getty Research Institute, CARA, Center for Book Arts, The Black Scholar, Women & Performance, Performanc Research, Movement Research Performance Journal, Brooklyn Rail, and Wendy’s Subway. She has a chapter on Chicago dance history forthcoming from University of Illinois, and two forthcoming independent artist books: Ephemeral Organ (EMPAC/Wendy’s Subway, 2026) and the co-edited in the horizontal plane: taisha paggett performance works (Soberscove Press, 2026; recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant).