About the project

Swamp Dialogues: situating B/black dramaturgies is a five-year, interdisciplinary research-creation project that brings together six B/black women dance artist-researchers to explore the metaphorical and material dimensions of the swamp as a site of inquiry, resistance, and transformation. Positioned as a dramaturgical provocation, the swamp becomes a powerful space for unworlding colonial logics and reimagining how B/blackness is embodied, theorized, and performed.

This project engages with the dual framing of B/blackness. Drawing from Bayo Akomolafe’s work (2023) Blackness (with an uppercase B) refers to specific, lived processes of embodiment and identification shaped by African and Afro-diasporic histories, whereas blackness (lowercase b) points toward a more expansive, unbounded phenomenon that resists ontological categorization: an anticolonial orientation that exceeds fixed identity.

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Using dance and performance as critical, non-traditional methodologies to explore the socio-political and aesthetic dimensions of B/black life, Swamp Dialogues seeks to examine how B/blackness operates and transforms across contexts.

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This research-creation project is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) 2026 Insight Grant award which runs from April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2031.