Black Arts in America: From Africa to The Americas

Global Education Center is a nonprofit multicultural arts center that uses the arts of diverse cultures to highlight our commonalities and promote cross-cultural understanding and respect through interactive arts experiences that aid in dispelling myths, dismantling stereotypes, and alleviating fears. All programming is designed to create an environment of inclusion and a climate promoting wellness and emotional wellbeing as we take the arts of the world to schools and community organizations through Middle Tennessee and Southern Kentucky, often serving as many as 70,000 people in a year. For the past 25 years, the teaching and performing artists of the Global Education Center have worked tirelessly and creatively to help students, teachers, and the community recognize that we have much more in common than we might think as we share our collective stories through the arts, building bridges and a shared understanding that we are all members of the same human family.

Each year we select a theme that is woven throughout much of our school and community programming. For the current year, that theme is Black Arts in America, exploring what the arts scene in America would look like without the contributions, influences, and aesthetics of Mother Africa and her descendants. Through music, dance, poetry, visual arts, dialogues, panel discussions, and films, we will trace the roots of art forms that have become beloved mainstays in American culture, reflecting on what our cultural lives would be like without those traditions. Do you like Jazz? Blues? Hip Hop? Lindy Hop? Reggae? Salsa? Capoeira? Breakin’? Would you miss them? Do you understand them? Do you know their roots?

It is this year-long exploration of Black Arts in America for which we are raising funds, culminating in a four-day Black Dance Festival with workshops, socials, and performances, including a theatrical production of Black Dance in America showing the journey from Africa to The Americas. Participants will experience the evolution of dance from traditional West African to early dances like Cakewalk and Blackbottom, to the clubs of the 1920’s-30’s in Harlem, to the fusion that created styles like tap, jazz, and even disco, to the street dancing of the 80s, popular line dances, and the hip hop culture that exists today juxtaposed with the evolution of dance in Latin America that rose to popularity as the Latin dance scene in America.