With support from the California Arts Council, the Dancing Cy(i)phers organization will continue operations for 2023 – 2025, including the development and production of a major performance work, 5th-Quarter Bantaba, producing regular dance education workshops, and producing our Dancing Cy(i)phers annual symposium that connects the coded languages of African-rooted dance.
Dancing Cy(i)phers core programs/symposiums are Hip Hop’s Embodied Expression, Back to the Root: The Healing and Spiritual Power of the Spine and Pelvis in African Rooted Dance and Back to the Root: Dancing Ancestral Cosmologies. These two day symposiums provided space for panel discussions, history lectures, movement classes that centered the cultural and spiritual reasons for the movement, all done through the lens of re-membering and decoding the coded retentions of African traditions. Back to the Root: The Healing and Spiritual Power of the Pelvis in African Rooted Dance evolved into monthly online series during 2020-2021.
Other programs include quarterly dance workshops at the Malonga Center and community presentations of the Here We Go Again dance workshop, which provides participants the embodied experience of how different traditional dances of the Mande, Luba, and Mongo people of west and central Africa track throughout the diaspora and show up again and again in African American dance, hip hop/freestyle specifically, as a means of rejuvenation, evidence of resilience, acts of resistance, and roads to revelation. Socio-political, historical and culturally specific information is shared about each dance embodied.

