African American Irish Diaspora Interconnections

Three film stills from Ancestry & Me, the first is of an African American contemporary dancer, moves to a piece of classical Irish music. The middle is a carousel and glimpses into 360 videos taken during my field research of ancestral sites in Wexford, Ireland, in 2022. The final still is of an Irish step dancer who moves to a traditional African slave song. They all contain cultural signifiers from the cross-pollination of the cultural diaspora derived from my African American and Irish ancestry from North America’s ‘age of mass migration’ from the 1600s European expansion into North America and the transatlantic slave trade.

Virtual reality forms a docu-memoir first-person narrative perspective to locate my positionality and viewpoint—the context developed from anthropological and sociological research. The view and design organize my artwork and analysis to capture various perspectives.

The dancers in synchronicity in one space open up the conversation about cultural intersectionality within ever-expanding Canadian diversity and belonging by connecting the relationships between heritage, culture and art.