Category: Blog

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August 23rd: College Green Performance, Cathedral Workshops and new Instagram Filter

On August 23rd 2022, we performed our memorial dance on College Green at 6pm outside the ‘Colston Window’ of Bristol Cathedral. Parts of that window have been removed by the Cathedral because of their celebration of Edward Colston. We had a few new people who hadn’t performed the dance before join us, which was wonderful. August 23rd is an important day in the calendar of memory work around enslavement as it is the day designated by UNESCO as the Day of Remembrance of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and its Abolition. You can read Jessica’s reflections on this as a Memorial Day HERE.

Our performance took place on College Green, which is also an important site of protest and activism in the city of Bristol, and in the week that Bristol Cathedral opened a new exhibition, ‘All God’s Children’ exploring the Cathedral’s connections to histories of enslavement. If you go into the cathedral you can learn about the connections between people commemorated in the building and their connections to this history.

Recording of the performance of the dance
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NEWS! Free Dance Workshop and Mass Dance Performance August 23rd!

Join us at Bristol Cathedral (in the Chapter House) on Tuesday 23rd August for a free dance workshop at either 11am or 12 midday to learn our new memorial dance. Workshops are free and open to all, but spaces are limited in the room so please do reserve your place using the ‘Register’ button below which will take you straight to the Eventbrite sign up to choose a time.

Register

Open to all abilities- please wear comfortable clothing you can move around in, and bring a bottle of water. There are a few small steps to get into the room but ramps can be provided, please let us know if you have any access requirements.

This event is held in conjunction with The World Re-Imagined and is supported by Bristol Cathedral

MASS DANCE @ 6pm!

Whether you’ve attended one of our workshops or not, you are invited to come and join us on College Green at 6pm on Tuesday 23rd August to perform the dance together as an act of memorial. 23rd August is designated by UNESCO as the International Day of Remembrance of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and its Abolition and by performing this dance together we memorialise, honour and heal together.

Come along and spread the word!

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Reflections on the workshops

[In this post, one of our project participants, shares some personal reflections on the workshop series of the Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies in Movement Project which ran from November 2021 to May 2022]

6th November 2021 

Memory and Transatlantic Enslavement

The session today, has made me ponder about memory and its intrinsic fluidity.  As Dr Jessica Moody quoted from Toni Morrison’s, The site of memory. Memory is like “water”, and “emotional memory [is like] ‘flooding’”. These words really resonated with me as memory should be free and ever flowing like “water”, not controlled, distorted, or sanitised. Which is why it is important that we collectively work together to decolonise our thought processes regarding this history. So that our memories of this history are in truth, un-sanitised, reflecting the historical realities of the histories of transatlantic enslavement.

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Bristol Harbour Festival Performance: Video

On Sunday 17th July 2022, Cleo, Kabbo, Latisha, Penny and Precious delivered the first public performance of the memorial folk dance developed through our workshop series. This was especially poignant as this year was the 50th Bristol Harbour Festival. The dance was performed on the Trinity Centre takeover dance stage, Millennium Square and featured an introduction to the project and forthcoming augmented reality app from Kwesi Johnson, and Cleo Lake also led an explanation of some of the key dance moves and their meaning and a tutorial for the crowd. Thank you so much everyone who came and supported us, and especially everyone who joined in! Watch this space for further tutorials so you can learn the dance for a mass participation event in August…

Video of the performance at Bristol Harbour Festival July 17th 2022
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BLOG: Dance, history and movement as co-produced research

Reflections on the workshop series. By Jessica Moody (Senior Lecturer in Public History, University of Bristol)

Alas, we have come to the end of our workshop series for the Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies in Movement project! As this marks the end of the first phase of our project, I thought I’d share some personal reflections on the workshops we held over the last 7 months. We first advertised for participants in October 2021 through this website, social media, press releases, local publications, local radio and word of mouth and held an online information event. Our first workshop was November 6th 2021 and these ran every first Saturday of the month thereafter until May 7th. We held these workshops hybrid (both online and offline) – at the Malcolm X Centre in St Paul’s, and online via zoom for those who couldn’t join in person (with all participants being able to hear and see each other). We also held monthly online ‘mid-point’ meetings on zoom where we carried on the conversations from the workshops and undertook other exercises and activities to develop ideas.

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