Dance and Performance Institute, Trinidad & Tobago

“Studies in Mas & Carnival Performance: Theory in Motion” with Institute Director, Makeda Thomas.

In this course, we approach Carnival as “theory in motion”—a living ritual where embodiment, creativity, and political imagination converge. Participants will apply key concepts from Carnival Studies and Performance Studies to analyze mas practices, examine mas as a space of memory, resistance, and relationality, and explore how embodied knowledge shapes Caribbean and diasporic performance. Through close readings, visual and movement analysis, and guided creative/embodied prompts, we investigate how theory emerges through bodies, gestures, craft, and collective play. Together, we ask: How do we theorize Carnival beyond festival? What historical, spiritual, and ecological lineages shape mas traditions? How do Black feminist and decolonial methodologies reframe Carnival analysis? What politics and poetics emerge through design and material practice? How do masmakers articulate theory through aesthetics, scale, and craft? And what future worlds does Carnival imagine and rehearse? The course culminates in the development of a theoretically grounded design, performance, or research idea related to Carnival. All sessions will be recorded for independent viewing.

4 ONLINE SESSIONS: THURSDAYS - 22 & 29 JANUARY, 5 & 12 FEBRUARY 2026. 5PM-7PM EST. Register online at www.makedathomas.org/online.

This online module is a program of the Dance & Performance Institute’s Carnival Performance Institute. Let’s Dance!

REPOST from . New Waves! 2025: Take me back to T&T

Where We dance, laugh, and ate straight from the trees

touched oceans and laid in river beds

drank rum and ron and romo with coke

Reconnected with our african diasporic brothers and sisters

made art , protested 🍉 and marched in the streets

All while beaming with joy!

New Waves! 2025. “This revolution of Emancipation, it did not happen. It is still to happen”. - our beloved Tony Hall. Let’s Dance! Repost

HIGHLIGHT: Dr. Thomas DeFrantz .defrantz returns to New Waves! Institute as the 2025 Keynote Speaker to present “Elaboration as Method: Black Dance as Quantum Portaling”:

The advent of quantum computing predicts an increased understanding of particles and waves as complimentary aspects of matter. Black Dance has, in its entirety, wondered with the aspects of physicality within teeming streams of history, honoring the ancestors even while inventing new forms that signify the brash youthful reinvention of ritual.  This talk explores elaboration as a method of portal, allowing Black Dance to move from the particles of individual practice through the waves of history and futurity.  How does Black Dance model ways to conceive quantum computing as practices of portaling ideas from the individual to the collective; from now to then?
 
Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor at Northwestern University, directs SLIPPAGE:Performance|Culture|Technology, a humanities and creative research lab. Believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that isanti-racist, proto-feminist, and q***r affirming. Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and is founding director of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Faculty and teaching at the University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz;SNDO; Juilliard; New Waves Institute; Bennington College; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Duke, the University of Nice. DeFrantz contributed concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that openedwith the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture in 2016. slippage.org

Let’s Dance!

Congrats to Dr. Marsha Pearce. Let’s Dance!

🎉 We're thrilled to announce that Dr Marsha Pearce has been awarded the prestigious British Academy Global Professorship and will be joining us here at the museum for the next four years.

Dr Pearce is one of two professorships awarded to University of Cambridge, alongside Professor Quentin Deluermoz.

Her research, 'Trembling Abode: Reimagining the Museum as Home for Global Majority Artists' will consider what makes a museum a home and how we might attend to issues of belonging and representation and confront entrenched power inequities.

Dr Pearce says 'I am excited to join the University of Cambridge community and to collaborate with the Fitzwilliam Museum to explore these questions. I look forward to bringing Caribbean perspectives to a dynamic exchange.'

📷 Photography by Ravendra

First highlight for New Waves! 2025 - "de las' lap"- we LIFT UP Institute Founding Director, Makeda Thomas - a with 30 years in the field.

MAKEDA THOMAS is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, curator, and scholar. Her work in dance theatre, film, performance, and installation has been created through collaboration with artists around the world. Creative Capital Awardee, with commissions and awards from 651 ARTS Black Dance: Tradition & Transformation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYS Council on the Arts, and many others. Choreography presented internationally, including at The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York Live Arts, HARLEM Stage/Aaron Davis Hall (New York), Brooklyn Academy of Music, Teatro Africa (Moçambique), CCA7, Queen’s Hall and Shaw Cultural Complex (TT), The National Gallery and 7 Arts Centre (Zimbabwe), Teatro de la Ciudad (Mexico), El Barrio Artspace (New York), the Delaware Museum of Art, and in the context of Carnival.

She has taught as a Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, on faculty of the American Dance Festival, and as a Visiting Artist at Yale University, MIT, Ohio State University, Middlebury College, University of Minnesota, and many others. A founding board member of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance, Thomas has been described as “belonging to that new breed of contemporary artists, the postmodern African Diasporan dancer-scholar whose work goes beyond stereotype and the market appetite for clichés regarding the black dancing body”(Gottschild). As a dancer, Makeda Thomas performed internationally in the companies of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, URBAN BUSH WOMEN, and Rennie Harris/ Puremovement. She began her study in New York with John Michael Goring and Eleo Pomare, continuing on scholarship at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, The Paul Taylor School, and Hofstra University where she earned a B.A. in Dance and English.

Makeda Thomas holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University and an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, where she is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies. Thomas lives and works between NYC, Chicago & Port of Spain. Let’s Dance!