In Our Own Words - Voices from 2025 DWB Fellowship Part 1

The October 3rd program of sur/renderings: the Dancing While Black 2025 Fellowship Showcase brings together three choreographers whose practices traverse memory, prophecy, and spirit.

From haunted houses of memory to prophecies of endings and the shadows of the collective psyche, these artists stretch the possibilities of performance—moving between the personal, the prophetic, and the spiritual to reveal what lies at the edges of reckoning and renewal.

📅 Friday, October 3, 2025 | 8PM | 📍 BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance

🎟 Tickets: bit.ly/dwbshowcase2025

✨ Read more about their artistic processes below.

AJ Wilmore

Q: How would you describe your artistic process?

A: My artistic process consists of lots of wandering, waiting, watching, and listening. I draw inspiration from images and issues most pressing to me at that moment. I try to listen closely to what is interesting to me and burning inside. Whatever is breaking my heart or giving me life. They typically come in the form of images or feelings. I then write them down and do more research while simultaneously beginning phrase work. I tend to create libraries of interests and dig through them via writing and phrasework. Getting curious and remaining a student, I find the cores of a movement in its most crystallized form, the clearest statement or if it’s to be blurred then the most blurred. And then suspension. If I stay inside of movements for a while and wait for the next idea to emerge it’s always something I could’ve never imagined. Outside the studio I look back at videos and start to form the composition. I ask myself, what would be the most effective container to hold these movements? Then, flipping and surprising myself, I ask what is it without a container? I start to think about what objects will help support and ground me in this world. I then practiced using them, sometimes watching how they stand on their own, what is the movement they have to offer and what kind of stories they tell. Using these tools I start to build a score. 

Q: How has participation in the DWB Fellowship contributed to your artistic process?

A: DWB Fellowship has just been wonderful at helping me in not thinking that my making process has nothing to do with anyone else. But truly has everything to do with everyone else. It’s really calling to me to ask myself what kind of player I want to be in this art industry. What do I offer to a group of 6 people? What can I offer a larger black arts community? People in and outside of my generation. What are the kind of conversations I want to have and what do I want folks to ponder? It’s helped me get out of my own head and quite frankly out of my own way. Then there’s the question of life. Not just what kind of artist you want to be but what kind of life you want to have, and how do you will it into existence. How to leverage your talents and make difficult decisions. DWB has shown me that I’m not alone. We’re all dealing with similar and dissimilar challenges. We all want to make an impact and be recognized for our light. It’s been affirming to just arrive at this point and feel the “Yes, I’m here. I’m right where I need to be.” I can feel the lineage and support of those who came before me. Having alumni and organizers in the space with us during workshops watching us work through difficult ideas and emotions has felt deeply supportive. It can be intimidating but those eyes and that challenge is what we’re going to have to show up to. It’s nice to be in the room investigating with people who want to see you shine. 

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Dominica Greene

Q: How would you describe your artistic process?

A: My artistic process is multimodal and deeply intersectional. Though my work is conceptual, any new process always begins by resituating myself inside my movement practice. Asking “how do I make space for what needs to move through my body?” I begin to excavate through a multilayered durational process, taking note of what qualities and themes are coming up within my body and spirit at the present moment. Then, moving to my large visual arts notebook, I notate every thought, saying, image, idea, and curiosity that emerged while in flow state. This can look like a poem, a map, a question… in fact, always a question. It’s in this workspace, at the convergence of physical/spiritual flow and written language, that I create my work from. 

Often sourcing inspiration from resonant literature and speeches that align with my ethos, these texts become a central force within my process, offering a guiding light and grounding perspective to anchor in. Whether I already had a concept or am devising one from within the practice, I begin experimenting and posing larger questions, typically utilizing spoken word, objects or props, video and sound components, and of course the body to flesh out my ideas. Ultimately, I aim to create an environment for the work that needs to be shared right now to craft itself through me. Various epiphanies and universal alignments show themselves throughout the course of this process –which usually lasts several years– allowing the work to expand further and further into itself.

Q: How has participation in the DWB Fellowship contributed to your artistic process?

A: The DWB Fellowship has been deeply affirming to my artistic process. Every workshop with an expert has demonstrated that art making is a life-long, nonlinear practice, highlighting that we must follow our artistic curiosities and desires even if they begin to stray from what we’re familiar or comfortable with. This takeaway has been the biggest contribution to my practice, affirming my deep need to always ask a question even if it feels uncomfortable or unclear. I have a better understanding that the creation process is the act of finding clarity; I don’t need the answer before I have it… From this fellowship I feel empowered to make the risky choice, because at least I will have done it!  As a member of the DWB cohort, I  feel grounded in community. I know that I can be held in doing the uncomfortable work, in exploring the unknown.

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Ja'Moon

Blurb about The Ghetto Shaman: That Which Lurks in the Shadows:

"Delving into the mental and emotional landscape of the radical and wayward spirit.

This work explores themes of fragmentation, conjure, trance, and exhaustion as they manifest in the reckoning with social and political shadows."

Intent:

I originally set out to create this work in order to highlight and reinsert an archetype often overlooked or disregarded in African American history. The role of the shaman—more commonly known as the conjurer, rootworker, or two-headed doctor—has long been, and continues to be, an influential leader, steward, and healer woven into the fabric of not only African American lives but also those of many other cultures. My mission has always been to give body to ancestral narratives and stories that have been overlooked, distorted, or subject to attempted erasure.

By embodying The Ghetto Shaman, I serve as a bridge between the seen and unseen, expressing the interconnectedness of body and psyche. I physically and sonically reference my own inner inhibitions and traumas—what many call shadows—while also invoking the historical suppression of my ancestors and the collective yearning for relief. I create space for these shadows to seep from the psyche into their physical manifestations, where they can be witnessed and transformed through this performance ritual.

The world is in deep need of shadow work. I want this performance ritual to conjure and hold space for that work. The kind of work that asks society to face what it often ignores out of the discomfort of confrontation.

Synopsis:

The Ghetto is a place where people, ideas, and concepts are confined to otherness, erasure, and exclusion. It is not only a physical location but a spiritual terrain—a realm that lives within all of us. It is where dreams, gifts, and the unwanted or unfaced emotions are buried and confined.

A shaman is a guide—one who can summon these disparate, fragmented aspects from the shadows and help them return to wholeness. They steward others through difficult encounters with what they may be unwilling—or unready—to face alone.

In The Ghetto Shaman: That Which Lurks in the Shadows, the shaman becomes a medium for the unfaced and fragmented parts of our collective psyche. These aspects emerge not only through the dancing body of the medium, but also the projected landscape that surrounds them. With the integration of projection mapping, this dance theater work transcends movement—it becomes a living visual invocation.

The Ghetto Shaman: That Which Lurks in the Shadows is a performance ritual that conjures themes of endurance, power, and transformation. The only way is through.