LIFE'S FULL CIRCLE: GONE FISHIN'

May 10, 2025 BCM-BCF Panelists: Dr. Yvonne Daniel, Deborah Vaughan, Halifu Osumare, Dr.Colette Eloi, and Eyla Moore

The Unique Bay Area Dance Community

Brings Me FULL CIRCLE

Greetings Halifu,

The BCM-BCF Sankofa Legacy Project continued on Saturday, May 10, 2025 in San Francisco at Minnesota Street Project. The photo above commemorates the panelists who explored the Bay Area Dunham-Beckford dance legacy. These four awesome multi-generational artist-scholars joined me to collectively share the unique qualities of community and wholistic socialization that our dance community always represents. We have passed that on to the current generation of SF and Oakland dancers.

These qualities set us apart from the more commercial scenes of New York and Los Angeles. San Francisco's and Oakland's social, political, and cultural activism established the tone for our African-Haitian dance scene, attracting many African, Caribbean, and South American nationals to the Bay Area.

This event was my last with the BCF 20th Anniversary celebration! The Beat goes on!

My Early Experience in the Oakland Dance Community

After studying jazz and modern as a undergrad at SF State in the late '60s with Nontsizi Cayou, Dunham Technique with Ruth Beckford, and Ghanaian dance in West Africa, I was ready to establish a community of dancers to celebrate the African diaspora, as well as the multi-cultural nature of the Bay Area.

After returning from a self-funded year in Ghana, I help create our dance community at Everybody's Creative Arts, which I founded in 1977. It created the energy that continues today at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in Oakland.

Everybody's Creative Arts Center eventually shifted into CitiCentre Dance Theatre in 1986 in Oakland at the Alice Arts Center, and our collective dance company was established with Linda Goodrich, Leon Jackson, Debra Floyd, Roger Dillahunty, Daniel Giray, and me. We became a modern jazz dance company to be reckoned with in the Bay, 1983-1988.

NOW: GONE FISHIN'

After 48 years of community cultural activism, I am moving into a new life cycle to focus on self-care and my home, planning an herb garden and occasional leisure travel. Going Fishin' Y'all!

STAY IN TOUCH THROUGH MY WEBSITE,

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL,

AND CHECK OUT MY BOOKS

The HO Website: www.hosumare.com

Includes:

My full Bio,

A Blog of short essays on dance and culture,

A Gallery of Photos

"I write and dance for my Ancestors, for I am their Wildest Dream!"

The HO Youtube Channel:

Includes:

PBS TV Special - Interview

Sacramento TV Studio Interview

Full-length Choreography Work

NYC Book Reading w/ Camille A. Brown

2008 Ghana Celebration of Pres. Obama's Election

"I have come to understand through my mission that dance is life and life is a dance and I am the eternal dancer."

Dancing in Blackness ON AUDIBLE

Dancing in Blackness covers the beginning of my dance career in the late 60s in the Bay Area, continuing to my expatriate period in Europe and my professional dancing in New York, as well as my first West African sojourn in 1976. All these international experiences led to my founding one of the first African-centered dance centers in Oakland, California, today known as the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts.

This story is vividly read by professional narrator Jeanné Giddens and delivered in a way that puts you in all those places.

CLICK FOR AUDIOBOOK

Dancing The Afrofuture

(2024) The story of a dancer with a long career of artistry and activism who transitioned from performing Black dance to writing it into history as a Black studies scholar.

BUY

The Hiplife in Ghana (2012) How one West African country has received hip-hop and turned it into a new genre by remixing it with their century-old pop music of highlife.

BUY

The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip Hop (2007) Explores the two reasons for hip-hop’s globalization: 1) American dominant pop culture internationally, and 2) hip-hop’s beat and empowerment of youth.

BUY

DANCE IS LIFE AND LIFE IS A DANCE!

hosumare.com