Fired up with Robert Farris Thompson

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

presents

ON FIRE WITH AFRICAN DANCE

Staccato Incandescence: The Story of Mambo

with Robert Farris Thompson

Thursday, March 14, 6pm

Robert Farris Thompson, Master T, the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, will focus his lecture on mambo, which fuses a variety of dance styles, from Lindy to ballet to bomba to Afro-Cuban dance.

Robert Farris Thompson is America's most prominent scholar of African Art, and has presided over exhibitions of African art at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He lived in the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria for many years while he conducted his research of Yoruba art history, and is affiliated with the University of Ibadan and Yoruba village communities. Thompson has studied the African arts of the diaspora in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and several Caribbean islands. Robert Farris Thompson is also an authority in hip hop. Cornel West, who teaches African American studies at Princeton, calls this white man from Texas "my dear brother" and "one of the greatest pioneers in the study of Afro-American culture and African culture."

The ON FIRE WITH AFRICAN DANCE series is presented by The Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and is produced by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Free admission

Click here for more information.

For information on other upcoming programs, including On Fire with African Dance presentations by Ronald K. Brown of Ronald K. Brown/Evidence (April 6) and Djoniba Mouflet (April 11), click here.