ABOUT
INTANGIBLE ROOTS is a dynamic polymathic educational experience created by embodied historian, filmmaker, and author E. Moncell Durden. What many think began as an online course has a dynamic history and is now morphing and transforming into something new.
HISTORY
During the 2001 Illadelph Legends, a summer festival held in Philadelphia by Rennie Harris Puremovement, Durden first had the idea of developing a certification program to teach people the who, what, when, where, why, and how of Hip Hop dance culture. As he developed the program, he began to interview the pioneers of the dance forms associated with Hip Hop culture. He turned those interviews into a documentary entitled Everything Remains Raw: A Historical Perspective on Hip Hop Dance.
In 2007 while still developing the certification, Durden was asked to participate in a weeklong intensive in Moscow, Russia. During this engagement he met and befriended Alkas Raftis, the President of the International Dance Council CID, Paris. CID was, and still is, the official umbrella organization for all forms of dance globally in addition to being an official partner of UNESCO. While in Moscow, Durden conducted personal research on CID and UNESCO, and he discovered that these organizations work to safeguard intangible cultural heritage: thus, the inspiration behind the name “INTANGIBLE ROOTS.” Alkas Raftis was interested in achieving for Hip Hop what had already been granted to other folkloric dances around the world: Government recognition of dance as cultural folklore. If Hip Hop could be identified in this way at a government level, it could become mandatory curriculum in schools. Unfortunately, the larger Hip Hop community did not understand the significance of this opportunity, and there wasn’t enough support for the endeavor. After years of trying, Durden moved on. He copyrighted the name INTANGIBLE ROOTS in 2010 but It wasn’t until 2020 during the pandemic that he decided to revisit the name and put it to use.
On Friday March 13th, 2020, The University of Southern California was heading into their Spring Break when all faculty, including Durden, received an email stating that school would continue remotely via ZOOM. Durden thought to himself, “there are many people globally that have expressed a wish to experience my lecture classes. Perhaps this pandemic is providing an opportunity to make that happen.” Durden could not and did not allow anyone to participate in his USC ZOOM classes. Instead, social media provided a platform through which he could share his knowledge to a global community. On Saturday March 28th, Moncell stated via Instagram that he would go live every Saturday for 10 weeks in order to provide free lectures to the Hip Hop dance community. These were the first online lectures for dance during the pandemic. Durden sometimes invited other prominent dancers in the community to discuss issues via his IG live, from tradition-bearing and cultural legacy to racial awareness and appropriation. The success of these lives led Durden to provide 4 full-length lectures in July 2020. These classes took place every Friday via ZOOM with lessons such as:
Ring Shout and the Kongo Cosmogram on July 10th , 2020
Blackface Minstrelsy, Black Hair, and Black Awareness on July 17th, 2020
Dance Beyond the Movement on July 24th, 2020
Exploring the Cultural Lineage of Hip Hop Dance on July 31st , 2020
These university-style lectures led to emails and DM’s asking if Durden would continue to offer information throughout the year. He decided to hold a Winter lecture session December 2020 and then another Summer session in 2021. He held all sessions under his brand, “INTANGIBLE ROOTS.” This all prompted Durden to return to his certification from 2001 and begin developing an educational program that could help other “street dance” practitioners not only dig deeper into the rich legacies and cultural dynamics of Hip Hop dance but also learn how to navigate academic institutions offering opportunities to teach. Durden’s certification was also focused on helping faculty in those institutions have a better comprehension of the history and heritage of Hip Hop dance by providing supplemental material for movement and theoretical classes.
Present & Future
Now, as an organization, INTANGIBLE ROOTS hosts events and offers lectures, knowledge drops, and merchandise through Patreon. Dropping soon will be INTANGIBLE ROOTS: Pedagogical School. The school’s courses will continue to focus on enhancing and furthering the knowledge of Black dance, movement, music, culture, history, heritage, technique, and people. These courses will prepare participants for developing, instructing, educating, and teaching others by providing a comprehension of the cultural context for Black dance practices. These practices include but are not not limited to: Jazz, Soul, Funk, Hip Hop, and House.
Stay tuned and follow us for details!
is a dance educator, choreographer, ethnographer, embodied historian, author and associate professor of practice at the University of Southern California’s Glorya Kaufman International School of Dance. He specializes in pedagogical practices that prove cultural and historical context in what he calls the morphology of Afro-kinetic memory.
A highly sought after instructor, Durden teaches practical and theoretical classes in the U.S. and abroad and is an expert in locking, house, hip- hop, authentic jazz, and party dances from 1900 to the present. He is a member of Mop Top Crew, the pioneering NYC Hip Hop dance group, and alumnus of Rennie Harris Puremovement, the Philadelphia-based hip-hop theater company. Before joining the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance faculty, Durden taught for seven years at Drexel University. He held appointments at the Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. He has published articles in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches, Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century, and the The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America. He is currently writing an article for the Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Dance. His groundbreaking documentary, Everything Remains Raw: A Historical Perspective on Hip Hop Dance, was invited by the U.S. Embassy in Vladivostok, Russia as a work in progress to screen at their 2013 film festival.
In 2010, Durden founded INTANGIBLE ROOTS , an organization dedicated to the education and preservation of Afro-Diasporic social dance formations.
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