Intangible Roots: With Professor Moncell Durden

Moncell Durden is a member of Brooklyn hip hop pioneering group Mop-Top and spent 10 years performing with Philadelphia Hip Hop company Rennie Harris Puremovement. A dance educator, choreographer, documentarian, embodied historian, author and Associate Professor of practice at University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman International School of Dance. Moncell specializes in pedagogical practices that prove cultural and historical context in what he calls the morphology of Afro-kinetic memory. Moncell teaches practical and theoretical classes in the U.S. and abroad; an expert in locking, house, hip-hop, authentic jazz, and American and European social dances from 1800 to the present. His book Beginning Hip Hop Dance was published by Human Kinetics, other articles appear in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches, the Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America, Rooted Jazz Dance, and the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance. He has consulted on the Baz Luhrmann film “Elvis”, Disney+ “The World According to Jeff Goldblum,” TV show “The Porter” and for Camille Brown’s “Mr, Tol E. RAncE,” & TED ED “The History of African American Social Dance,” Denzel Washington film “Ma Rainey” and new Broadway production “The Hippest Trip.” Moncell also appears in a number of documentaries, Uprooted: A story of the journey of jazz dance, WACO “The Evolution of African Dance,” and “Why Do We Dance” produced by sky studios in the U.K. to name a few. His own documentary “Everything Remains Raw: A Historical Perspective of Hip Hop Dance, is available on Youtube. Moncell is currently working on a new text book covering African American Dance.   

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