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Grant Wood Fellow Talk: Kieron Dwayne Sargeant

Apr 6, 2023

07:00 PM

Stanley Museum of Art, Lobby

160 West Burlington Street, Iowa City, IA 52242

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A Black man waring a black t-shirt and a black hat looks at the viewer

"The Limbo Dance - From Backyard to Concert and Commercial Dance Stage"

Kieron Dwayne Sargeant’s artist talk will traverse the limbo dance from a wake/funerary dance to the concert and commercial dance stage looking at the adaptations and dramaturgical devices which afforded this change.

Kieron Dwayne Sargeant is a Trinidadian-born interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, dancer, and dance researcher who emerged from the African-Caribbean tradition. Sargeant received an MFA in dance performance and choreography from Florida State University and an MA in community dance practice from Ohio University. Over the past 20 years, he has been involved in documenting, assessing, and analyzing dance traditions of the Caribbean and establishing a canon of dance teachings and workshops, informed by his research, to popularize the ancestral survival of movement traditions between the Circum-Caribbean and Western Africa. His research focuses on the emerging field of African Caribbean and African Diaspora dance practices. In particular, his work explores both regenerative and deconstructionist methodological approaches to engaging with African traditional Trinidadian dances for the commercial and contemporary dance world. His artistic practice includes translating sacred cultural and spiritual practices into artistic practices, resulting in dance works for the concert stage. He has performed works by Merce Cunningham, Charles O. Anderson, Tiffany Rhynard, and Milka Djordjevich,  among many others. In 2020 he founded and launched the Kieron Sargeant Dance and Dance Education Foundation of Trinidad and Tobago, a new platform for artists/dancers to nurture their creativity, inspire their environments, and empower themselves and the future of the arts industry in Trinidad and Tobago. From August 2021 to March 2022 Sargeant was a collaborator on a Mellon-funded project, Writing the Body, with Dr. Lara Cahill-Booth, an English professor at Miami Dade College. Sargeant was a visiting assistant professor of Contemporary Forms of the African Diaspora at the University of Iowa during the 2021–22 academic year.

If you are not able to attend in person, join us on the event livestream: https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/98328257811 

a man performing a limbo dance

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa–sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact in advance at