"Whiteness and the Fractured Jazz Dance Continuum" 

Join Lindsay Guarino, M.F.A., Associate Professor with the Music, Theatre, and Dance department, to explore how jazz dance, an indigenous American art form rooted in Black American people and culture, is often mislabeled and misunderstood.

Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States, Guarino will present the obscured story of how normalized Whiteness permeated the form so that, today, participants and audiences alike participate unaware in misguided appropriation of artistic capital. To see jazz clearly, one must deconstruct historical narratives by considering who the storytellers have been, what biases may have been present, and what parts of the narrative were left behind. To this end, Guarino will share her research on how Africanist aesthetics and cultural values are the bedrock of American jazz but have been historically devalued and systemically invisibilized.

She will also provide specific examples of how and where jazz dance fractured from its Black American roots. By tracing jazz from its roots in West Africa, to its origins in African American culture, to its myriad manifestations today, one can more clearly see how jazz both reflects and subverts American values and offers limitless potential for better understanding the complexity of American identity.

Lindsay Guarino (she/her) is an artist, educator and scholar. As associate professor and chair of Music, Theatre and Dance at Salve Regina University she has facilitated the dramatic growth of the dance program including its new major focused in jazz studies. Her historical and embodied research interrogates the impacts of Whiteness on jazz history and practice through an antiracist lens, and investigates the intersections of jazz pedagogy, Africanist aesthetics, American history, identity and culture. As an educator and a leader, Lindsay prioritizes community at the heart of her practice and seeks to cultivate spaces where individuality is celebrated and recognized as vital to personal and collective growth.