Elisabeth Clarke-Hasters, BGHRA Consultant: Arts & Culture studied classical ballet and modern dance in Philadelphia, in North Carolina and at the School of American Ballet in New York She began her acting studies at age 13, and was a member of the Children’s Repertory Theatre in Philadelphia and the Poor People’s Theatre in New York. She was also a member of the Dance Theater of Harlem. She came to Europe in 1971to study at the Mudra school of Maurice Béjart, and danced with the Ballet du XXème Siècle. Before turning to choreography and teaching she worked extensively with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pina Bausch, and performed as an actress in the municipal theaters of Köln, Düsseldorf and Koblenz.
Clarke-Hasters has been a choreographer for the Salzburg Festival, the Burgtheater Wien, the Maggio Musi-cale in Florence, the Oper Leipzig, among others. She was assistant school director at the Arturo Schauspielschule in Köln, and school director at Die Etage in Berlin, where she also led the dance department until 2018. She has also developed several programs for dance in schools, specifically combining dance composition and STEM curriculum. In 2010 she completed her training as a per-sonal development coach and is presently developing several new programs, including a coaching program specifically for People of Color.

Sonya Donaldson, BGHRA Executive Director of Media & Archive is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Colby College. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Irreconcilable Differences?: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora. She has also launched a digital humanities project, “Singing the Nation into Being: Anthems and the Politics of Black Performance,” which focuses on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” (also known as The Black National Anthem). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where her research focused on Afro-German autobiographical narratives. Dr. Donaldson’s academic research centers on the intersections of race, gender, class, sexual identity, and technologies

Keith Green is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Rutgers–Camden. Dr. Green’s main research and teaching interests lie in African American literature, with more specific investments in the study of the antebellum era, self-referential writing, African-Native American literature, and slave narratives. He has delivered papers on Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and William Wells Brown. His current book project, Not Just Slavery: African Americans Write Captivity Narratives, Too: 1816-1879, explores the various kinds of bondage and confinement–specifically Indian slavery, Barbary captivity, and state imprisonment–African Americans experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century.

Rosemarie Peña is the founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA). In this role, she has co-produced and hosted five international academic conferences on Black European Studies.Rosemarie earned bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and German and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. Her research explores displaced childhoods with a special focus on the historical and contemporary intersections of transnational adoption and child migration. Her dissertation, The Rekinning: Portraying Postwar Black German Transnational Adoption, is a discourse analysis of two historical documentary films.

Rosemarie has presented at numerous conferences and is a frequently invited keynote speaker internationally. She is a contributing author in several edited volumes published in both German and English. Her peer reviewed articles have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood, Genealogy Journal, and the Journal of Adoption and Culture. Rosemarie’s most recent essay, “Black Germans: Reunifying in Diaspora” appears in Silke Hackenesch’s editid volume Adopting Children across Race and Nations: Histories and Legacies (Nov. 2023).

Amazon Author Link

Emily Frazier-Rath is an educator and researcher rooted in the fields of German Studies, Migration Studies, and Feminist Studies. In addition to her work for the BGHRA, she is also currently Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. She earned her PhD in German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder in May 2019, and her MA in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati in 2013. Emily’s most recent publication entitled To Be Seen and to Be Whole: Black German FLINTA* on Community, Identity, and Connection appeared in The German Quarterly in fall 2022.

Emily taught the inaugural Beginning German I class for Black German adoptees and their families in May 2022, which was made possible through the generous support of the Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Emily’s current research centers on the pedagogical effects of engaging in transnational and transcultural dialog to build mutual understanding through deep, community-based learning in the humanities classroom. This work is informed by her collaboration with Dr. Rosemarie Peña in two courses they have introduced to the Davidson College curriculum: Black German Art & Resistance and Race, Gender, Migration.

Hammer and compass in Mozambique. We see a GDR flag waved at a rally in Maputo, carried by “Madgermanes”, contract workers who once toiled in eastern Germany. Some of them founded families there, like Eulidio. His daughter Sarah grows up with her mother in Berlin. The relationship with her “second home” is slow in growing, partly thanks to Luana, Sarah’s baby, whose father Eduardo is also from Mozambique. Eulidio still remembers the Lubmin nuclear power plant. Today he fries chips in Springs, South Africa. Meanwhile, Sarah only knew her father from a photo for the longest time: rather cool-looking, wearing a cap. She met him for the first time when she was eleven and felt how comfortable she was surrounded by people whose skin is as dark as hers. As an adult woman she decides to spend some time in Mozambique – and meets Eduardo. On the flight back she’s pregnant. This documentary observation by Brenda Akele Jorde deals with Sarah’s attempt to weave together and spin out threads that were torn by the fall of communism. And it shows the challenges this brings: While Sarah is confronted with racism in Germany, in Africa she’s regarded as a German. While once her father Eulidio was expelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now it’s Eduardo who sees his daughter only sporadically. Carolin Weidner

The Wound is Where the Light Enters is the story of 15 children born in the LRA and Kormojong conflicts coming together to create a performance based on their memories.

The film has been produced by Vardo Films (UK) in partnership with The Alpha Group (Austria), The University of Birmingham (UK), The University of Leipzig (Germany) and Facilitation for Peace and Development, FAPAD (Uganda)

The film has been supported through generous contributions from the University of Birmingham College of Arts and Law Impactful Research Fund, a research grant from the The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/T007877/1) and funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 642571.

As our registered guests will have the opportunity to view the film free of charge and at no cost to the BGHRA, the  Producer and the BGHRA conference program committee invite viewers to offer a voluntary donation to either to FAPAD in Lira, Uganda or to GRACE INTERNATIONAL – a UK based charity working towards the empowerment of children born of war and their communities in Northern Uganda and other parts of the world. The bank details for the transfer of donations will be made available upon request.

See below for the trailer for The Wound is Where the Light Enters:

The Wound is Where the Light Enters : Trailer from Vardo Films on Vimeo.

Gabriella Ghermandi is a musician, performer, novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Addis Ababa in 1965 to an Italian father and Ethiopian mother, and raised in Ethiopia. In 1979, a year after her father’s death, Ghermandi moved permanently to Italy. In 1999, her short story “Il telefono del quartiere” (“District Phone”) won first prize in the Eks&Tra literary competition for migrant writers. In 2001 she won the third prize in the same literary competition with her short story “Quel certo temperamento focoso” (That Certain Fiery Temperament).

In 2003, Ghermandi was among the founding members of the online magazine El Ghibli, the first Italian periodical with an editorial board made up of foreign authors who write in Italian.
Parallel to her writing, Gabriella Ghermandi has been building a considerable reputation as a performer of narratives adapted from Ethiopia’s oral and musical tradition. Her readings are usually accompanied by Ethiopian music and songs and revolve around a series of historical events. These performances have toured around the world.

She has been a speaker at events such as the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) conference (2007). She was also on the jury of the 23rd Neustadt International Prize for Literature (20013), which was won by her nominee Mia Couto. In April 2007 her first novel, Regina di fiori e di perle, was published by Donzelli Editore, and the English translation, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, came out with Indiana University Press in 2015, and in 2017 translated in Amharic and published in Ethiopia.

In 2010, in an effort to bring together Italian and Ethiopian musicians as a way of fostering mutual dialogue and artistic creation, she created the Atse Tewodros Project. This project got its start in Addis Ababa, growing out of the collaboration between Ethiopian composer Aklilu Zewdy and Professor Berhanu Gezaw. The Atse Tewodros Project is named after one of the most beloved emperors in Ethiopian history, the first emperor not of Ethiopian royal descent. He rose to power due to his perseverance and charisma, qualities that charmed the Ethiopian people to the point that they broke with centuries-old tradition and supported his accession to the throne. Atse Tewodros was the emperor who modernized Ethiopia while respecting its traditions. He was also the emperor who fought against Queen Victoria’s army and defended Ethiopian independence in the century of African colonization.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance.  

 Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award  (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016; a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017); the Dance Magazine Award (2022); the New York University Hemispheric Center for American Politics and Performance 2022 Mellon Foundation Artist in Residency Award; and the 2022 Dance History Scholars Scholarly Achievement Award.

 A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, she is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University.  As an artist-scholar she coined the phrase, “choreography for the page,” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.

 Nationwide and abroad she curates post-performance reflexive dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos, and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse.

www.bdixongottschild.com and Facebook

The Reproduction of Power Dynamics in Subcultural Spaces

With a theater director as a father and a modern dance choreographer as a mother, growing up in and surrounded by theatre and dance productions, shaped Sophies childhood. Following her parent’s footsteps, Sophie-Yukiko has been in dance training as far as she can think back. Her mother Elisabeth-Clarke Hasters, once a dancer for companies like the Harlem Dance Theatre, Bèjart or Pina Bausch, had send her to ballet classes as soon as possible.

Getting to know the subcultural dance world as a young teenager, ballet quickly became less interesting to Sophie. As she learned about Hip Hop and House dance, she found a world of diversity that she for the first time could blend in and instantly felt drawn to. Meeting the team of Whogotskillz, she started taking Nu-Style/ commercial dance classes as one of their Protegés. By coincidence, she then found her way into the commercial dance business, without a performing arts degree, straight from the studio on to the stage.

Since 2009, she has been working as a professional dancer, dancing for national tv shows, artists and productions, as well as for world-leading brands. Travelling to Los Angeles and New York City, to exchange with other performers and practice, she was able to see, how different people express themselves through dance, and what stories they tell while moving.

In 2014, she went back to her dancing heritage and the subcultural dance community, looking for something to reignite her love for dance and art. After she met Georgina, the german Trailblazer of Ballroom Culture and Voguing dance, she agreed to walk her first “Ball”. It sparked the passion she had long missed and changed her path and purpose forever.

Voguing now became the biggest and most important part of her dance life and identity as an artist. It is a dance, that emerged out of Ballroom Culture, a culture formed and created by gay, queer and trans* people of color.

In July of 2019, the former House of Melody, the first german House founded by Georgina, became the European chapter of the House of Saint Laurent, one of the oldest, still existing Houses of Ballroom history, also known from the critically acclaimed award winning documentary “Paris is burning” from the year 1990.

Sophie is known in Ballroom as Yukiko Saint Laurent Laveaux. She is the german Overseer of the Iconic House of Saint Laurent and the Overall founding mother of the Kiki House of Laveaux.

In her artistic work, she centers the topics of memory and heritage, legacy, violence and perception.

Currently, Sophie works as a screenwriter and author, as well as cultural curator performance artist and actress.

Brenda Akele Jorde (1993, Hamburg, Germany) is the daughter of a German photographer/web designer and a Ghanian DJ/ restaurant owner. She got interested in documentary film during her undergraduate studies (Media Studies at the University of Potsdam). Her final project included the short documentary film portrait VA-BENE which was screened at festivals around the world and which encouraged her to pursue a career as a documentary filmmaker. Between 2018 and 2022 she studies Documentary Film Directing (MA) at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and shot the shortfilms A WAY OF BREATHING (2020) in Iran, STICK OF JOY (2020) in Berlin as well as her first feature length documentary film THE HOMES WE CARRY (2022). Her films so far deal with self empowerment through art, queerness or effects of migration for the individual. Brenda also works on film festivals in Berlin and as a circus pedagogue in social institutions.

Dana Day is a New York born, Bath, UK -based actor. She has trained and performed widely in theatre in the US and UK with an MA in performing Shakespeare from Bath Spa Uni her most recent academic achievement. She is the cofounder of Momentum Acts and recently finished a production of Othello in which she played the title role. Dana was a part of an earlier audio version of A Moving Grove where she voiced Bottom/Porter.

Read more about Dana HERE!

Photo Credit Nina Znidersic

Since 1987, he worked radially from his base in Cologne, Germany, as dancer, teacher, choreographer, actor and singer, in diverse productions of dance, opera, theater and television. He remains internationally active in all fields, working in the global north and south, where he is engaged also in community and educational settings, with professional and non-professional dancers, actors, singers and musicians of all ages.

As Ballet Director of Opera Graz (2001-2015), he engaged dancers and choreographers from 29 countries thereby endorsing cultural diversity, and he regularly collaborated with protagonists of the free scene. His vast choreographic output during these years includes re-visioned established works like Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Romeo Juliet, Firebird, Rite of Spring, and Nutcracker as well as original experimental creations using commissioned scores, acousmatic and electroacoustic music as well as live-improvisation. Darrel Toulon was awarded the First Austrian Dance Production Special Prize (2002) for successfully modernizing the dance company of Opera Graz. His Community Dance Project THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR (2015), created with young Refugee Migrants resident in Graz was awarded a “Place of Respect” Seal in 2016”.

His on-going seminal Docu-Dance-Theatre project IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER is about and with Children Born of War in Bosnia (“U IME OCA” – 2019) and Children Born in Captivity in northern Uganda (“OTINO ONYWALO ILUM” – 2020), and follows on from a series of stage productions using artistically transformed biographies of young people whose lives have been created or destroyed by war. IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER is constructed at the crossroads of verbatim documentary physical theatre, trauma transformation, and artistic citizenship.

“U IME OCA” was invited to the Osijek Peace Awards 2020 in Croatia, and Darrel was invited by the European Parliament in Brussels, to curate the Panel Discussion “Children born of war – from hidden population to bridge builders in post-conflict societies” in 2021.

Darrel Toulon is founder and artistic director of the alpha group, based in Vienna and teaches at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, as well as at the Alma Mater Europaea University Ljubljana. He is regularly invited to Lecture on his work with vulnerable populations, using Docu-Dance-Theatre as a tool for creating socially and politically relevant performance art, most recently at Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien, and Sarajevo University of Psychology.

He held briefly the position as Vice-Rector for Art at Anton Bruckner Private University before advancing to the Research Unit where he continues to develop Docu-Dance-Theatre as a model for participatory performance art, trauma transformation and societal change.

He organizes conferences and workshops, which bring together artistic practitioners and academic researchers, experts from the disciplines of performance, psychology, sociology and contemporary history, to explore trans-disciplinary conversation platforms for the silenced and under-privileged, which could enable audiences to share safe spaces with professional performers as well as everyday experts.

Darrel Toulon was awarded the Styrian Golden Cross of Honor in 2016.