Choreographer Camille A. Brown Tracks the History of Black Social Dance

Back in 2012, Salon writer Alex Pareene brilliantly eviscerated the cult of insipid TED-Talks in an article titled “Why TED is a Massive, Money-soaked Orgy of Self-Congratulatory Futurism.” It included gems like:

The model for your standard TED talk is a late-period Malcolm Gladwell book chapter. Common tropes include:

Drastically oversimplified explanations of complex problems.
Technologically utopian solutions to said complex problems.
Unconventional (and unconvincing) explanations of the origins of said complex problems.
Staggeringly obvious observations presented as mind-blowing new insights.

What’s most important is a sort of genial feel-good sense that everything will be OK, thanks in large part to the brilliance and beneficence of TED conference attendees. (Well, that and a bit of Vegas magician-with-PowerPoint stagecraft.)

That on-point savaging hasn’t stopped the TED stage from being the ultimate career goal of hordes of 21^st century public intellectuals/professional public speakers who build their brands and hawk their content in the quest to be rock stars with intellectual cred, with the TED stage being their coronation. But occasionally – every once in a while – something genuinely cool and worthwhile makes it way down the TED pike, and it’s usually not making grandiose claims even as it recasts what you thought you knew about a subject.

Camille A. Brown. Photo courtesy AlvinAiley.org

In her TED presentation, acclaimed choreographer Camille A. Brown explains what dance is, what social dance is, and how the practices/manifestations and trajectory of Black social dance is embedded with complex politics ranging from those of slavery to Jim Crow to the birth of hip-hop – and so much more. It’s a fast-moving and dense clip, as enthralling as it is illuminating. And as it takes these dances back to their roots, historicizing and contextualizing them for the 21^st century viewer, it also underscores the ways in which Blackness is the well the whole world draws from.