DE received the Aid to Research Related Events, Exhibition, Publication and Dissemination Activities (ARRE) granted awarded by the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies (OVPRGS). This grant served as the funding for the ABC’s of DE conversation series.

The program consisted of five monthly events with ten invited speakers representing scholarship and/or artistic practice in the fields of dance and black performance studies. Each event  will produce two entries corresponding to the keywords used for each event for the Vocabulando,  Each  event will be presented in a hybrid format with the support of 4th Space. Guest speakers from Montreal and Ontario are invited to attend in-person, following necessary COVID-19 protocols. Those outside of Canada will by necessity join via video conference. Each event will be live streamed and later archived on the 4th Space platform and the Dramaturgical Ecologies website. To accommodate COVID restrictions, the events were held entirely online. Our target audiences are the Concordia community (faculty, staff and students) and the larger public. Dramaturgical Ecologies’ pre-existing networks and alliances including LePARC, Milieux, CISSC, HUMA, EAHR|Media and the Departments of  Contemporary Dance and Theatre enable engagement with the Concordia community.

In addition to encouraging a dialogue between black artistic practitioners and scholars both  in Quebec and beyond, the proposed event series will contribute significantly to an area of research  scholarship that remains underdeveloped at Concordia but nevertheless timely: i.e. the study of  black performance. In the specific field of dance - of which Montreal is Canada’s acknowledged hub - dramaturgy is a fledgling discipline and the calls for decolonial approaches to dance creation  make the association of blackness and dance dramaturgy a necessary and important axis of reflection for practitioners and scholars alike.