Born in the race conscious 1950s, raised with the radical nature of the 1960s, educated with the opportunities in the 1970s, started my professional artistic career in the post-modernism of the 1980s, developed my mastery in the global, technological and revisionist boom of the 1990s, by the time I hit 2010 I was simultaneously irreverent, idiosyncratic, enigmatic, inclusive, self-estranged, integrating, Theosophist, Buddhist, accommodating, tri-cultural, bourgeoisie, scholarly, phat sassy and slice you in a heart-beat vernacular. I am the New Black, and there are a lot of us.
We flit through the various aspects of our heritage as we code-switch leaving those not in “the club” baffled, faces furled in confusion. I can hear them thinking, “She sounded so white just a minute ago!”
I now bask in my enigmatic and unfathomable nature but I did not come to my mystery easily.
(This is an excerpt from a future blog on African-American Aesthetics. This mini-blog is in response the the Writer’s challenge–Worlds Colliding The Daily Post. I will post the fuller blog, Creative Synthesis, in the coming weeks.)
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LUANA holds a BA in Dance from The College of Saint Theresa in Minnesota and a MA in Dance from Mills College in Oakland, California. Luana is currently a tenured professor at City College of San Francisco teaching Dance Production, Dance History, African-American Aesthetics, Choreography, Modern and Jazz technique, and runs the Repertory Dance Company. She is a co-coordinator the dance program, which is one of the largest college dance programs in the United States. She has taught at Mills College, Laney Community College, JFK University, and is presently a lecturer at Dominican University in the LINES BFA program. Before teaching at the collegiate level she taught academics through dance for 15 years at the K-12 level. She has been acknowledged for her teaching and mentoring by her peers, and the CCSF Dance Program, in which she has worked for the past 25 years, has won the prestigious Izzy Award for lifetime achievement. In addition to her teaching career, Luana successfully performed in the U.S. and in Europe. Currently she is researching the role of the African-American aesthetic as it has informed the American aesthetic and will publish her findings in two books: What Makes That Black? The African American Aesthetic and What Makes That Black? The African American Aesthetic in American Expressive Culture. Her research has applications in art criticism, anthropology and education. Luana is an avid gardener, neophyte bocce player, and a long-standing student of theoretical quantum physics.
What Makes That Black? 