Block integrates powerful and creative forces in dance piece

Emma Block, a third-year Anthropology Indigenous Worlds Concentration, Environmental Thought & Practice major and Dance minor at the University of Virginia, offered a dance piece centered on collaboration, a call to those before us and after.

The work reaches forward and backward into the histories and stories of the humans and more-than-humans that perpetually define us. Block aims to uplift marginalized stories and cultural dances through this piece.

This work has included collaboration beyond the dancers and choreographer, integrating what Block notes as “powerful and radical creative forces. These contributions including individuals in the Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute, Katie Schetlick from the dance program, Noel Lobley from the music department, Minh Nguyen and others from UVA Bluegrass, ‘X’ from the Black Power Station situated in South Africa, and an extraordinarily infinite and cyclical list of nameable and unnameable forces.”

Block is a third year recipient of a Cobell Scholarship, and will be studying at the University of Aukland for Spring Semester 2025. She is the great grandaughter of original enrollee Willie E Dodson, choreographed and performed a dance piece centered on collaboration, a call to those before us and after us.