Department of Music

The University of Virginia McIntire Department of Music presents the African Music and Dance Ensemble directed by Michelle Kisliuk on Friday, April 18th, 2014 at 7pm in Old Cbell Hall.

The African Music and Dance Ensemble explores traditional music and dance forms from Western and Central Africa. Directed by Michelle Kisliuk, the ensemble holds several performances a year, including outreach events in the Charlottesville community. Spectators are often invited to join in the dancing and singing. The group also hosts special guests for concerts and workshops.

Michelle Kisliuk received the doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University in 1991. Integrating theory and practice, she specializes in a performance approach to ethnographic writing and research, and in an ethnographic and critical approach to performing. Since 1986 she has researched the music, dance, daily life, socioesthetics, and cultural politics of forest people (BaAka) in the Central African Republic, and has also written about urban music/dance and modernity in Bangui (the capital city). In addition, her work extends to the socioesthetics of jam sessions at bluegrass festivals in the United States. Her book, Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (Oxford University Press) won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and a Laura Boulton Senior Fellow in Ethnomusicology. Her current research/writing project is a collection of theoretical essays and case studies that address the ongoing project of performance ethnography, focusing in particular on her recent research with the House of Israel community in Western Ghana. Along with her academic teaching in Music in Everyday Life and Field Research and Ethnography of Performance, she directs the UVA African Music and Dance Ensemble.

For more information please call the McIntire Department of Music at 434.924.3052.