Melanated Chrysalis: Dance MFA thesis event

Dance MFA candidate Sadé Jones presents MELANATED CHRYSALIS. The outward facing project includes an immersive dance performance centering the body as an archive of ancestral memory, demonstrating how movement encodes and transmits diasporic knowledge. The audience is invited into a chrysalis - a point of liminality - where the African diaspora is mapped, webbed and woven within a body. With infusions of music, prose and visuals, the performance employs Sadé's developing body excavation and movement signature techniques. A talkback session will conclude the evening.

Anchored in Black Feminist practices of care, this performance is an expression of the closed process of The Womb Cypher and Sadé's archiving which ran from Spring of 2023 and will continue beyond the thesis. This event is in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis in the Graduate School of Duke University.