Lindsay Blue Annie Rapport

Lindsay Blue Annie Rapport aka Dr. Blue (she/her) is an educator, scholar, dancer, and choreographer. She earned her PhD in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside in 2022, under the guidance of professors Imani Kai Johnson, Anthea Kraut, and Sage Ni’Ja Whitson. Lindsay’s current manuscript, tentatively titled Radical Togetherness: Freestyling and the Relationality of Vibing, discusses the power and potential of our profound interconnectedness—on the dance floor and off. Situated in clubs, cyphers, and battles, her ethnographic research theorizes vibing (grooving with, attuning frequencies) as a mode of relationality that can refuse white supremacist and capitalist constructions of subjecthood as violently individuated. As we share rhythm and energy, freestyle dance practices invite us to understand ourselves in relation to the music, to each other, to the environment, to the moment, to the vibe. Lindsay’s work attends to the ways the cultivation of collectivity, collaboration, and community through freestyling can speak to otherwise ways of being in and with the world outside of dance. Lindsay discusses these ideas in a forthcoming article, “Dissenting Dissonance: Vibing and a Refusal of Social Death,” and in her 2024 Tedx talk, Radical Togetherness—and other life lessons from the dance floor.

Lindsay co-founded, co-organized, and co-directed Bowdoin’s inaugural Community Show & Groove. Grounded in the principle that dance is (for the) community, this event welcomes the community onto the dance floor as active participants rather than spectators. Integrating formal dance performances throughout the evening, Community Show & Groove features live music and DJing, as folx are invited to gather, to dance, to witness, and to get down together. Read more about this event in professor Nadia Celis’ op-ed, “A party like no other at Bowdoin”.

Like her research, both embodied and scholarly, at its core, Lindsay’s pedagogy is also about cultivating community. She initiated and co-organized with her colleague Dr. Irvin Manuel Gonzalez a series of gatherings surrounding the theme of pedagogy and/as an ethics of care, inviting educators to be in conversation and share resources with one another. Deeply invested in education’s liberatory potential, Lindsay approaches teaching through student-centered, trauma-informed, and collaborative pedagogies.

Lindsay has presented work at the Dance Studies Association, American Studies Association, Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies, and Collegium for African Diaspora Dance conferences, and she was an invited panelist at Dancing the African Diaspora: Igniting Emancipatory Possibilities through African Diaspora Dance. She was a 2023-2024 Baldwin Center for Learning and Teaching Faculty Fellow, and she was a recipient of both the Faculty Research Award and the Course Development Award. At the University of California, Riverside, she was awarded the Graduate Research Mentorship Program Fellowship and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship, and she was a 6-time Gluck Fellow of the Arts. Lindsay performed with ENVY Dance Company for over a decade, also serving as Rehearsal Director and Assistant to the Founder & Artistic Director. She has been teaching in higher education since 2015 and joined Bowdoin’s faculty in 2022.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Hip hop culture; street and club dances; popular dance and performance; transmission, appropriation, and globalization
• Black dance; African American expressive cultures; Africanist aesthetics, African diasporic connections and cultural diasporas; embodied (de)constructions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and personhood
• Black radical tradition; Black liberation; choreographies of protest; abolitionist and decolonial praxes
• Student-centered, abolitionist, and liberatory pedagogies; critical ethnography; decolonizing methodologies