* This page is under construction and will be updated through June 2025.
Public Dance Interventions: A Digital Archive
From Ari Christopher, Executive Artistic Director
In a world increasingly shaped by systems that thrive on separation, competition, and the erosion of collective care, the act of coming together—bodily, relationally, and without pre-scripted outcomes—becomes a radical gesture.
Improvisational dance in public space offers more than aesthetic disruption; it creates fleeting but potent architectures of solidarity. These choreographies of presence, unpredictability, and mutual responsiveness reorient how we relate to one another and to power. They hold space for connection where fragmentation is expected, for softness where control is imposed.
The following example illustrates how such embodied gatherings can mobilize joy and interdependence as political tools capable of contesting the forces that divide us.
Conceived by Dr. Shamell Bell and collaboratively organized by Angel Adams and Shabazz Ujima, this iteration of the Global Dance Meditation (GDM) mounted a site-specific, improvisational street dance intervention in North Nashville. It was presented as part of the 2020 Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice—a social arts initiative founded by Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons at Vanderbilt University, in partnership with Fisk University, Frist Art Museum, and Millions of Conversations.
Dr. Bell, an original member of the Black Lives Matter movement, theorizes about and enacts Street Dance Activism—a methodology that situates dance as grassroots political action and a catalyst for what she calls joyous resistance and revolutionary healing. She positions the practice as community engagement, rather than a performance spectacle: “Global Dance Meditation is NOT performative. It is an act of solidarity, an embodied pledge. To move in the dance is also to move in the world.”
Participants engaged in improvised, collective movement that flowed from one site to another—traveling through public space, shifting energy through breath, vibration, and grounded choreography. The practice created a somatic field of presence that was responsive to the trauma and displacement affecting the neighborhood, particularly following the 2020 tornado and the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim was not only to foster communal reconnection but to reclaim space through joy and healing.
In post-event reflections, residents and organizers noted that the intervention disrupted long-standing divisions between institutions and the surrounding community. Participants observed a perceptible transformation in energy as the group moved—an offering of visibility, tenderness, and alignment with the needs of a neighborhood often sidelined by urban development and systemic neglect. Rather than staging a fixed choreography, this intervention invited a participatory, improvisational form of protest and presence—foregrounding Black liberation as a felt, collective, and ongoing process.
Dr. Shamell Bell is a street dance activist, scholar, and original member of the Black Lives Matter movement whose work centers dance as grassroots political action. With a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA, Bell integrates improvisation, meditation, and community ritual into public-facing practices like her Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation. Her research and embodied interventions activate resistance by transforming everyday spaces into platforms for collective healing and social critique. Through movement, Bell enacts what she calls “choreographies of the liberated,” disrupting dominant narratives and inviting alternative futures. She currently teaches at Dartmouth College.
Source: Our Stories, Our Impact—a multimedia exhibit by UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, sharing the stories of UCLA alumni advancing equity and equality in America.
https://ourstoriesourimpact.irle.ucla.edu/shamell-bell/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2025.