Dreams & Defiance: A World Re-Imagined comprises an interactive program series, community-based installations, research initiatives, and a forthcoming exhibition that illuminates the often under-recognized cultural connections that exist between social music and dance traditions from the Iberian Peninsula, the Maghreb (North Africa), West-Central Africa and the Americas. Using artistic practice and objects to share artistic cultures primarily from the 700s through the succeeding centuries, the work complicates definitions of these geographic spaces by presenting cultural practices in ways that highlight connections and variation.

Programming highlights include live performances, interactive dance workshops, multilingual storytelling, symposiums, public discussions with artists and intergenerational educational programming. With a focus on both past and present, the project explores the subsequent routes of these cultural traditions in their movement, dissemination, and impact across regions. Ultimately, Dreams & Defiance helps initiate dialogues about interrelated histories between different communities by centering conversations about diaspora, cultural migration and the power of artistic practice. 

Dreams & Defiance uses a lens of performance (music, dance and storytelling) and object-based inquiry to discuss commerce, cultural fusion, exile, perseverance and power. Performance is an excellent way to place multiple narratives in conversation. By centering performance, the work provides unique ways to explore Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Roma, Arab, African, and hybrid artistic and cultural practices across distinct music and dance genres.

Dreams & Defiance’s interactive program series has taken place at institutions such as 92nd Street Y and New York University. As part of this project, in 2021, at the National Jazz Museum, the project included an evening-length presentation and film that shared the socio-cultural links between jazz, Latin music, Afro-Cuban music, and various dances of the Americas. In spring 2022, at the iconic Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, the filmed version included a behind-the-scenes journey through known and lesser-known locations in the historic building, a curated presentation of objects and artifacts shown publicly for the first time in the theater’s 100-plus-year history, and performances featuring voice, music, movement, comedy, and fashion.

Brown Bag Series

This brown bag series speaks to the art, activism and public scholarship integral to the forthcoming innovative program series and exhibition.

These informal discussions at the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies seek to share innovative new scholarship that blurs the lines between academic and public work. 

Centering a multidisciplinary and ethnographic approach, this workshop investigates the circular flows of music cultures of the Atlantic World.

Brown Bag Series Links

Program: Embodied Defiance: A Comparative Study of the Erotics of Social Dance in the Dominican Republic and Brazil

Program: The Politics of Sponsorship and Resistance, An Unofficial History of the Puerto Rican Day Parade

Program: Dreams and Defiance: Storytelling through Salsa in Times of Celebration & Crisis with Frank Ferrer

Select Symposiums

Program: Dreams and Defiance: A World Re-Imagined through Social Music and Dance Symposium

Video Link: Teaser for a Day of Dreams, Defiance, and Dance with the New York International Salsa Congress

Program: Panel of “What’s the Right Way to Dance Salsa?”

Roots x Routes x Innovations: Interactive Drumming Salon & DJ Workshops 

This interactive drumming workshop that explores the sonic roots, routes and innovations that flow through various forms of percussive music-making.

The workshop centers practice and performance imagined broadly. Playing rhythms will help participants think through complex, trans-global, theoretical and artistic conversations between the circum-Caribbean, Brazil, West-Central Africa and Western Europe.

Drums and percussion instruments will be provided. No experience necessary. Workshops include hip-hop, turntablism, sound systems from Jamaica to hip-hop.

Dreams & Defiance Instrument & DJ Equipment Donation Program

Our gracious co-sponsors and donors allow us to donate new and gently used instruments, DJ equipment/software, and gift certificates for DJ workshops to students and musicians in the tri-state area.

The Living Room Series

Intimate, informal dance, story-telling, and music showings of new or works-in-progress from artists in living rooms, basements, rooftops, warehouses, and piers. Happenings include explorations in musicality, composition, story-telling, improvisation, and urban stomp-defiant joy embodied.

This project is made possible by the support or co-sponsorship from: