Lela Aisha Jones will facilitate an interactive and performative lecture grounded in black lifeways and embodied practices of global blackness. Her research remains critical maroon, sacred grove, and hush harbor artistry as people who live with darker melanin in the U.S. still face unbelievable, continual racial violence. Though, this is not a cry for help. This labor is revolution, release, restoration, and revival. The aim here is to illuminate the ancient intertwining of breath, temporality, and rhythm as they exist now withininterdisciplinary dance making that includes music, film, material culture, and experimental performance art. With breath as a timekeeper or pacer in the artistic process, multiplicities of embodied time and synchronization become possible. Through this portal dances termed as traditional with long lineages make their way into new existences. Artistic inquiry and performance research create experimental sanctuaries that intertwine ceremony and ritual for the manifestation of contemporary cultural memories with movement as a central guide. 

Dr. Lela Aisha Jones (LAJ) is an embodied multi-genre maker, community-based curator/organizer and inter-arts collaborator that locates her scholarship in the realms of artistic inquiry and performance research. LAJ has earned a New York Dance and Performance | Bessie Award Nomination, a Leeway Transformation Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. LAJ currently resides in Philadelphia with her family and is the Director of the Dance Program at Bryn Mawr College. (Note: LAJ is pronounced by saying the letters L-A-J. It is an expression of and in solidarity with gender non-conformity and gender fluidity.)