Full Description
Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships documents the emergence of new forms of black social and vernacular dance in 1970s California, forms embedded in local cultural histories but connected to the contemporary global culture of hip hop/streetdance. The book weaves interviews and ethnographies of first generation (1960s-70s) dancers of strutting, boogaloo, robotting, popping, locking, waacking, and punking styles, as it advances a theory of dance as kinetic kinship formation, through a focus on techniques and practices of the dancers themselves. The term given to these collective movement practices is kinethic, to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss. As dancers engage kinethics, they reinvent gestural vocabularies that describe worlds they imagine into knowing-being.
The stories in Kinethic California attend to the aesthetics of everyday movement, seen through the lens of young artists who from childhood listened to their family's soul and funk records, observed the bent-leg strolls and rhythmic handshakes of people moving through their neighborhoods, and watched each other move at house parties, school gyms, and around-the-way social clubs. Their aesthetic sociality and geographic movement provided materials for collective study and creative play. Bragin attends to such multidirectional conversations between dancer, community, and tradition, by way of which California dance lineages emerge and take flight.
Contents
Vignette
Damita's Solo Flight
Introduction
Chapter One. Soul Train Locamotives
The Breakdown
Locamotive Power
At Netta's House
All the Ways We Dance Backward
Chapter Two. Popping & Other Dis/Appearing Acts
(flesh surfaces ripple)
Polycentric Dance Histories
(impossible positions)
What's Poppin'?
(the body steels itself)
Dancing The Fillmore on the Ground of Displacement
(form transforms)
Stop Motion Dance
(pause)
zero is where we dance
(seeing in touch)
Breath Touch
Chapter Three. The Rebirth of Waacking/Punking
Libation
Tyrone (August 29, 1953 - June 6, 2020)
Streetdanscendances
What's Waacking/Punking?
Shabba Doo (May 11, 1955 - December 29, 2020)
Going To Gino's
At Fazil's (an innerlude)
Waacking and Hip Hop Dance
Women In Hip Hop Dance
Lossed
Touched
Bedtime Story
Bibliography
