The Pursuit of Tension: Lineage, Labor, and the Cultural Economy of Black Dance

Abstract

This thesis investigates the question of value: how Black artists can honor the cultural, spiritual, and communal worth of their work while navigating systems that fail to materially recognize it. At the center of this inquiry is my creative methodology, The Pursuit of Tension, which emerges from both lived experience and embodied research. I begin in my own inheritance. I am the child of artists whose creative brilliance was undeniable, whose work-built community and inspired transformation, yet who could not sustain themselves through artistic income alone. Their artistry was celebrated but not compensated; cherished by communities, yet overlooked by the very systems that claimed to value art. I witnessed this contradiction etched in their spirits, their faces, their bodies, and I now carry it in mine. That embodied inheritance of contradiction and resilience forms the foundation of this thesis.