What happens when you are swept up into a cultural experience that throws your curiosity into overdrive? When you have no words to describe what has happened beyond what you feel because you don’t possess the exact cultural context but are connected through similar ways of knowing? When you’ve gained cultural knowledge and want to share it beyond the cultural community from which the experience emerged? Through this conversation/presentation, Latanya d. Tigner shares colorful lessons about how to respectfully enter and engage cultural communities, learned during her informal observation of African movement and spiritual retention in New Orleans jazz funerals and Second Line parading traditions. She also shares how these lessons continue to impact her resulting creative representation of this process, St. Ann and N. Rampart. Audience members will witness Second Line in its indigenous spaces, as well as embody some of Tigner’s lessons through Second Line movement.

Tigner performs professionally with Dimensions Dance Theater in multidisciplinary works rooted in African diasporic dance. She holds a BA in physical education/dance and an MA in arts administration. She directs Dimensions Dance Theater’s youth company, and she currently lectures in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.