KQED Arts Shorts

07/05/2022

🚨 NEW EPISODE DROP 🚨

🗣️Meet Sean Dorsey, the first openly transgender modern dance choreographer who has brought his trans-positive performances to cities all throughout the U.S. through Sean Dorsey Dance.

His powerful works blend contemporary dance, q***r partnering, music and spoken word. And this year, his organization Fresh Meat Productions is celebrating its 20th anniversary of fostering creative expression, advocacy and education.

Watch them perform at Z Space in our San Francisco episode of 👇

bit.ly/ICCD_SeanDorseyWeb

Sean Dorsey has spent the last two decades championing trans and q***r performing arts in San Francisco, with the Fresh Meat Festival he founded, showcasing trans and q***r performance. And he has toured his own innovative modern dance to more than 30 cities in the U.S. and abroad.

05/17/2022

🚨 NEW EPISODE DROP 🚨

🗣️ Meet Indigenous Enterprise, an intertribal dance group that’s elevating Native representation to new heights through film, fashion and dance 🪶

KQED Arts' new episode of Phoenix is now live 👇
https://bit.ly/ICCD_PhoenixWeb

04/19/2022

🚨 Last day to vote is Thursday!

Vote for in The Webby Awards and help the dancers take first place this year.

Vote now: https://bit.ly/VOTE_ICCD

I just voted in The Webby People's Voice Awards and checked my voter registration.

04/07/2022

🚨 BIG NEWS 🚨

KQED Arts’ has been nominated for a 2022 Award.

Now it’s up to YOU to help us get first place! 🏆

VOTE NOW: https://bit.ly/KQEDWebbysCities2022

04/03/2022

🥁Taiko drumming is an important element of Obon, a Japanese Buddhist festival that celebrates and honors one’s ancestors.

"It’s like a martial art, a dance, a sport and theater arts, all at the same time.” — Tiffany Tamaribuchi, founder of Sacramento Taiko Dan

Watch KQED Arts' Sacramento episode 👇

09/03/2021

Dancer, choreographer and artistic director Rennie Harris founded the first and longest running dance company in the U.S., Rennie Harris Puremovement 👟💥

The -based dancer pioneered street dance theater, bringing social dances to concert stages with ground breaking narratives. In this new 'Dance Legends' episode, Rennie breaks down with us five major moments from his life.

07/31/2021

It’s the infusion of soul that helps make Philadelphia so distinct from its harder-edged Chicago, Detroit and New York counterparts.

Philadelphia’s 1980s house scene had rhythmic music and freestyle dance styles with African diasporic and Latin influences. Now more than three decades later, a tight-knit, intergenerational community of house dancers, DJs and event producers in are still working, amidst commercialization and club closures, to keep the original underground spirit of the scene alive.

06/30/2021

Just when the world was turning its back on East St. Louis, dance legend Katherine Dunham planted creative seeds that helped to quell the violence and other social problems created by poverty and racism among the youth.

Having traveled all over the world and finding inspiration in Haiti, Cuba and Jamaica, Dunham created an Afro-modern-Caribbean dance technique in East St. Louis, known as the Dunham Technique.

📺 Watch how the Dunham Technique still lives in the city today in .

05/27/2021

Honolulu is home to tourism hotspot Waikīkī, and many of the city’s beachfront hotels host lavish lūʻaus showcasing styles of hula influenced by Western music and instrumentation. But for Native Hawaiians, the origins of hula are deeply spiritual and rooted in Hawai‘i’s creation stories and the history and culture of their kūpuna or ancestors. Driven by the mele (poetry), hula marries movement with spoken word to express stories about specific deities, people, places and events.

Learn more on how words, music and dance weave together with on this episode in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

05/01/2021

In Los Angeles, jam skaters draw from a community and culture built over generations at Venice Beach and at rinks across the city. Over the past year, roller skating hit the mainstream as a safe and relatively accessible pandemic-era pastime, its international popularity bolstered by people recording their shaky progress on social media. Skates were sold out for months, and skaters have become major influencers on Instagram and TikTok. But longtime skaters are quick to remind everyone: This isn’t a trend.

Dating back to the ‘80s, OG jam skaters with boom boxes in hand, claimed the boardwalk as their outdoor roller rink, showing off acrobatic freestyle moves, flips and choreographed routines. Today many of them still skate, passing down the scene’s history and moves to younger skaters.

In this episode of ​, meet some of LA’s Black skaters who are pushing the culture forward amidst a pandemic and economic downturn.

03/10/2021

📺 BONUS from : From the girls and women helping revive Washington, D.C.’s Beat Ya Feet culture to San Francisco tap dancers creating space for a new Chicana aesthetic, watch how women are breaking barriers in dance and forging paths for future generations to follow. Together, their movement reminds us of what is possible when women, with our multitude of intersectional identities, collectively come together and demand to be seen, respected, and celebrated in our fullness.