Lindsay Blue Annie Rapport

Affiliation: Theater and Dance
Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance

Lindsay Blue Annie Rapport is an educator, scholar, dancer, and choreographer. Driven by an anti-racist pursuit for social justice, Lindsay’s research—embodied and scholarly—asks how we build community around and through dance. In particular, her research explores vibing (grooving with, attuning frequencies) as a technology of Black sociality in freestyle hip hop dance practices and its potential to challenge white supremacist systems and structures. Through an examination of the profound connections dancers forge with the music as well as with each other, her workasks what takes place physically and metaphysically as vibratory energies converge and merge. Her research presents this intricate interconnectivity as an alternative to a Europeanist, capitalist construction of a violently individuated self, offering instead an existence in and as radical togetherness. As a choreographer, she explores collaborative modes of creating with. Interrogating how hip hop’s sociality, in addition to its embodied aesthetics, can be adapted to the concert stage, her work asks how dancers can authentically support and celebrate each other in this type of performance space.

Lindsay performed for over a decade with hip hop-based ENVY Dance Company and alsoserved as Assistant to the company’s Founder & Artistic Director. She has presented work at Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies conference, Dance Studies Association conference, American Studies Association conference, and the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance conference. She is a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship, the Graduate Research Mentorship Program Fellowship, and she is a six-time Gluck Fellow of the Arts. She received her PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside.

Education

  • PhD candidate, University of California, Riverside
  • BA, Pitzer College