The Black Dancing Bodies Project tells the stories of Black women through dance

By Colleen Smith • September 28, 2024 1:30 am

A packed audience was treated to a special night at Orcas Center.

Woman in the Woods Productions brought the Ladies of Hip Hop to the island for their performance of “The Black Dancing Bodies Project: Speak My Mind.”

The show aims to uplift and celebrate Black women in street and club dance culture. Black Dancing Bodies addresses the “erasure, miscoding and often intentional exclusion of Black women’s work and voices.” BDB has embarked on a journey to collect, preserve and tell the stories of these women through dance works, interviews and photo documentation that can be presented both on the stage and in the streets.

The nonprofit Ladies of Hip Hop is an all-female intergenerational dance collective based in New York that creates works illuminating the strength, power and diversity of women in hip hop.

Founder and executive director Michele Byrd-McPhee has led the organization for the past 15 years. In 2020, she was awarded an Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship grant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught her course “Hip-Hop, Women and the World.”

After the performance, Byrd-McPhee and other members of the collective answered questions, which ranged from what is hip hop; do you choreograph as a team or individually; where does your choreography come from; and what do you think about white people doing hip hop?