Tracing the Dance: Movement as Method in a Study of Black Barbadian Women's Lived Experiences

This doctoral project examines Black Barbadian women’s dance as a site of knowledge production, historical memory, and embodied cultural analysis. It develops a decolonial, practice-led framework centred on movement as method in response to the marginalisation of Black women’s lived experiences in Caribbean historiography and dance scholarship.

Structured as four interrelated essays, the project traces the relationship between Barbados’s socio-political history and the emergence of Black dance as literacy, memory, and resistance; develops dialogues-in-dance as its central methodological contribution; examines movement as healing and restoration; and rethinks the Black avant-garde through Black Barbadian women’s choreographic practices. Dialogues-in-dance is an improvisational research method grounded in ethnochoreology, choreopoetics, and practice-led collaboration. It enables movement to function as inquiry and supports a more culturally specific engagement with Black Barbadian women’s narratives, lived worlds, and embodied thought.

The selected case studies show how Black Barbadian women use dance to work through labour, healing, pleasure, social pressure, memory, and self-fashioning. Across domestic, public, and performative spaces, movement emerges as a critical archive through which everyday life becomes legible as social knowledge and cultural analysis. The project further shows how Black Barbadian women’s dances generate forms of critique and imagination that are important to decolonial thinking, particularly in relation to the body, history, performance, and selfhood outside dominant Western interpretive frameworks.

Two further methods, Atlantic-Notation and the Kamaria Technique, were developed to support analytical and creative work within the project. These culminate in She, Fugitive, Nebula, an interdisciplinary choreopoetic performance combining dance, poetry, drama, film, and visual art. As a creative research output, the performance translates the project’s findings into live practice and demonstrates how Black embodied knowledge can be carried across scholarly and artistic forms.