Over 20 Years In The Making

NO BOUNDARIES: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers began as an evolving repertoire of solos choreographed by several generations of prominent African American artists and performed by Gesel R. Mason in one evening. With choreographic works spanning the 1940s to the present, NO BOUNDARIES performances delivered snapshots of, and created discussion around, the trajectory of Black dance over seven decades.

Mason, understanding that her body could only serve as the living repository for these choreographic works for a finite period, set out to create a digital home for NO BOUNDARIES. The No Boundaries Digital Archive transforms Gesel’s journey into a versatile, digital humanities platform and archival database that invites you to embark on your own journey, interacting with the stories and legacies of African American choreographers. The No Boundaries Archive Project (NBAP) brings together Gesel Mason and co-director, Rebecca Salzer, Director of Dancing Digital, to explore ways dance can care for, preserve, and transmit the choreographies and legacies of artists whose voices are often absent or excluded from physical and digital archives.
 

"I am thinking about embodiment and how I experience the dancing body as an archive; a repository of memories, movements, and choreographic texts. And if the body is an archive, how might dance in digital space be a way to access that content, and provide a resource to current and future generations of dancers, scholars, historians, etc. "
– Gesel R. Mason