This interview is the first in a series focused on the American Folklife Center’s Community Collections Grants program, highlighting each of the 2022 grant recipients and their projects over the course of the 2022 grant project year. The Community Collections Grants program is part of the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path initiative, which seeks to create new opportunities for more Americans to engage with the Library of Congress and to add their perspectives to the Library’s collections, allowing the national library to share a more inclusive American story.
Congratulations to you and your team, Junious! First, tell us about your organization, Urban Artistry.
Urban Artistry, Inc. (UA) is an internationally recognized non-profit organization dedicated to the performance and preservation of art forms inspired by the urban experience. UA focuses on urban dance forms born in Black and Brown urban communities, including Breakin’, House, Hip Hop, Popping/Boogaloo, and Locking, among others. Serving as cultural ambassadors for communities that are often unsung, UA fulfills its mission through collaborations that support artists’ past, present, and future.
I founded Urban Artistry, Inc., in 2005 in the Washington, DC metro area to focus on the authentic preservation of Urban Dance culture. Recognizing the absence of comprehensive and consistent education in these cultural forms, I reached out beyond the boundaries of a genre of dance, past solipsistic communities of practice, and pulled together artists of all ages to learn how to pass on these cultural traditions responsibly. The idea was, “what if dedication to cultural preservation, reciprocity, and entrepreneurship could foster a community of artists who share a global and intergenerational perspective on creativity and art broadly?”
One way that UA does this is through acknowledging the importance of archiving; making accessible the voices of dance communities, as both author and audience of its preservation, through multiple avenues of programming since its inception. Notably, The Preservatory, established in 2013, archives and shares the voices of the global urban dance community through interviews with dancers, DJs, MCs, club owners, music producers, and music lovers.
So, tell us about your project…
Sure thing! Our project is Follow the Music: Exploring the Multi-Linear Legacies of House Culture, or FTM for short. FTM is an initiative to expand upon the common narratives and document a wider range of the community voices that define the multi-linear legacies of House Music and Dance Cultures (HMDC).
As specific HMDCs moved from underground and localized venues to mainstream globalized events (e.g., international battles and workshops), the intricacies of each community of practice have been overshadowed. Battles, demonstrations of dance movement mastery and musicality, that once served as one aspect of HMDC, have become HMDC’s most recognizable visual representation in popular culture and media.
Frankly, generalized phrases such as “The House community” do not embody the actual complex and distinctive scenes that exist in so many U.S. cities where HMDC have localized traditions, such as: particular rites of passage; level of guidance or participation from elders; musical subgenres; and locus of practice. One community may host battles; another might teach classes in a studio; another might cypher (host a dance circle) in a club; and another community might do all of the above, and any of them may be in conflict or harmony at various points throughout the city’s history. Importantly, the daily work of community bu