What does the project involve?
Pat Noxolo is asking for volunteers to watch some videos on her website that demonstrate short dance movements from a small range of African and Caribbean dances – more information about each dance will also be available. Then you will video yourself doing the dance move on your own webcams/devices. Each video will be 4-7 seconds long, and you will film yourself in a place of your own choosing. You will then email the videos to Pat Noxolo ( p.e.p.noxolo@bham.ac.uk ) or send your video through Whatsapp, to +44 750 021 7708 - if you choose you can also send a sentence or two saying why you chose to film the video in a particular location and perhaps any reflections on how it felt to learn/perform the move. Pat Noxolo will convert the videos into looping gif files and upload them onto the website. All the videos together, each one playing on a loop, will form a set of ‘dancing maps’ that anyone can look at, email me comments or send more videos to add to them.
More about volunteering to send a video
Each dancing map will look a little bit like this, only with different people all doing the same move (NB: don’t copy these moves – more and much better moves are coming):
On Thursday 20 November 2014, there was a public event at Birmingham University, as part of the ‘Being Human’ festival, a large Humanities festival. At this event the dancing maps were projected onto a screen, and ACE dance company also performed a live dance based on the dancing maps. There were a series of presentations based on the project.