Stafford Berry is one of nine winners of the 2024 Midwest Culture Bearers Award. This award celebrates artisans and folk arts practitioners whose work is rooted in cultural preservation and sharing knowledge with the next generation.
“I’m an African American practitioner of African-rooted dance, and I represent the legacy of Baba Chuck Davis (my dance father) and Dr. Kariamu Welsh (my dance mother). I’ve been teaching African-rooted dance and theater in Indiana and Ohio for 15 years; currently, I am a Professor of Practice in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, where I am Director of the legendary IU African American Dance Company.
My work is deeply rooted in the practice and preservation of African dance traditions and their contemporary functionality for marginalized people in the U.S. As a sought-after teacher, elder, knowledge bearer (Griot), and practitioner of African-rooted dance, my work preserves and extends African American culture and its relationship to its African ancestry. I do this work with my dancing communities across the country: Baba Stafford & Company, Baba’s Rising Sons, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, AADC, and others.
African American people are losing many African traditions. My work values technology and contemporary society along with tradition, while upholding movement practices that sustain Black bodies as archive of cultural practice. For example, I staged on AADC, Doundounba, a traditional “dance of the strong man, or dance of the big drum” from Guinea, West Africa. After a few iterations, I renamed the work ‘Strong People Dance’ to better serve my dancing community in (re)claiming our cultured past while acknowledging our contemporary identities. My work centers the Africanist and Queer communities to which I belong and in the spirit of Ubuntu, ‘I am because we are.’”
