Consuming Blackness Diasporically (CBD) is a performance ethnography project focusing on traditions across Black diaspora including Trinidadian "canboulay traditions" (such as rapso, pan and folk performance). Chicago “house” music, and Brazilian "capoeira."

CHANZO OF INSTITUTO PALMEIRAS PRESENTS CBD

LISTEN: Dr. Chanzo Greenidge (Trenel) presents reflections on Capoeira and the Consuming Blackness Diasporically process for the African and Afro-Caribbean Performance Conference, UC Berkeley, September 2008. The session was chaired by Nicole Castor, and also featured Dr. Meida McNeal and Patricia Moonsammy of the CBD Collective.

 CBD Berkeley Part 1.MOV

In a collaborative format, we explore how these regional traditions of cultural practice inform the construction of particular and local “black” identities. The CBD technology platform will incorporate existing multimedia technologies (wikis, blogs, and “jam” sessions facilitated through real time videoconference links) to create an intimate forum where artists and scholars can present, exchange and produce their experiences of and reflections on blackness, identity, citizenship and belonging through a virtually-mediated critical/creative exchange.

Building a transnationally-based virtual archive and collaborative forum offers expansive opportunities for application and use including:

• Creating an open-ended exchange for interaction/community dialogue
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• Constructing a flexible holding (archiving) space that is less dependent on the parameters of time/space (i.e. as opposed to issues for making live studio work wherein renting space, scheduling logistics, and deadlines to finish creative work are often imposed)
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• Experimenting with digital modes of scholarship by allowing multiple formats of documentation/analysis to live together including the following components: Text/writing (critical thought, poetic, choreographic process notes); Aural (mixes, interviews, excerpts from rehearsal process); and Visual (moving images and still clips from rehearsal/performance, original cultural contexts, places/landmarks associated with house)

CBD is envisioned as a multi-phased and multi-year project that will eventually culminate in a face-to-face creative interaction and critical dialogue between the selected sites. We hope to innovate new options with technology that allow a spectrum of communication channels to get beyond the limitations imposed by the previously used choreographic model ("Care Packages”). The CBD format uses aspects of the methodology of Race Travels: Care Packages from Trinidad to Chicago and back again…, (2004). Featuring Noble Douglas Dance Company Inc and ThickRoutes Performance Collage, this exercise in transnational artistic collaboration and communication explored constructions of “race” and “ethnicity” in Trinidad and the US through an experimental choreographic process. "Care packages," comprised of videotaped movement explorations, audio taped conversations, personal letters and other items, became the solution that TRPC and NDDCI arrived at to solve the dilemma of trying to collaborate together without the means to support a “face to face” workshop and performance setting. The culminating performances utilized video-conferencing technology in order to link the Chicago and Trinidad contingents in a simultaneous real time performance event.

Over the course of CBD's development, we will employ real-time communication, delayed communication, text or visuals and brief or extended forms. Digital communication is easily captured and archived, and hence transforms itself into the raw material for exposition and dissemination. We will build a solid virtual frame that engages the community agents involved creating both individual wiki sites (Phase 1) for each ethnographic location (US, Trinidad, Brazil) and an umbrella site (Phase 2) linking the three discrete locations.

Ultimately, we envision CBD as potentially having the following innovative outcomes:

• Building humanizing technology that provides impetus for community learning and use of new media and technologies, especially among communities that have limited access
• Production of a multimedia series of materials, including a DVD documenting the process of the comprehensive collaboration, a virtual shell (to allow others to replicate our process) and an edited volume concerned with intersections between international collaboration, critical ethnography (focus on ethics, accountability and social justice), and digital scholarship
• The creation of a transnational performance piece. In addition to its own value, the piece will serve as a platform for active collaboration among artists, technology experts and academics across the three sites of the process