Moving Your Way is a movement experience that invites all participants to explore their rhythmic sensibility and tap into their authentic soul. After a 30 minute meditation participants will be guided though techniques of African dance and improvisational movement by Nailah Randall-Bellinger, artistic director of RootsUprising, and Jeryl Palaña Pilapil-Brown.

An Afrofuturism 2022 Event

Nailah Randall-Bellinger (she/her) is a dance educator and scholar. For over thirty-five years, she has taught modern and contemporary classes throughout the United States and abroad at national conventions and universities. She has studied, performed, and lectured in Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, the Czech Republic, and Senegal. She has worked with film director and poet S. Pearl, and performed as a member of Karen McDonald’s New Age Dance Workshop dance company and Jamie Nichols Fast Feet, Inc. After receiving a Masters degree from Lesley University with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studies: Dance, and African American literature, she began to focus and develop the concept of the “dancing text” as a means to explore the corporeality of dance. In 2015, Randall-Bellinger collaborated with a group of artists in Cambridge to give voice to the voiceless in the production of Stories Without Roofs: Transitions, featuring essays, monologues, poetry, songs, dance, and general musings of residents of shelters in the city of Cambridge. She has created original work for Boston-based contemporary dance company Urbanity and was choreographer for the Boston production Ragtime at Wheelock Family Theater. In 2020, she was awarded the Alorie Parkhill Learning and Travel Grant to study expressions of dance in South East Asia. Randall-Bellinger currently serves as the Chair of the Dance Department at The Cambridge School of Weston. She has been a teaching artist at Harvard Dance Center for over a decade. In Spring 2021, Randall-Bellinger facilitated the first of a series of virtual artist-led discussions around artistry, identity, and advocacy, where she presented her film works #shesstillbreathing and Women’s Work, both inspired and constructed within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic. She most recently was a co-choreographer for the A.R.T. Arboretum project. She is also one of seven artists commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) in 2021 to create a new work on campus. The work, titled Initiation– In Love Solidarity, explores the resilience and evolving identity of women of the African diaspora.

Jeryl Palana Pilapil-Brown, is a Filipino-American choreographer, dancer and educator in Boston. Since graduating from Dean College with her B.A. as a dancer major, she has traveled throughout the states and abroad to Canada, London, Barcelona and Japan to immerse herself in various dance styles; the main ones being contemporary, floorwork, street styles and heels. Jeryl now dedicates her time teaching and sharing with students of all ages throughout New England. She aims to bring diverse groups of people together through her choreographic works and organizing annual events like “The Hip Hop Exchange” dance festival.