T. Lang Dance

Spelman Dance in Marrakesh SDAN 327 DIASPORIC RESEARsH IN PERFORMANCE IN MARRAKESH, MOROCCO MAY 11-JUNE 7, 2026 4 WEEKS, 4 CREDITS DANCE MAJOR /MINOR ELECTIVE AND GENERAL ELECTIVE Information Session Wednesday, October 22 5:00pm-6:00pm Location: Cosby 328 • Understand application process, course offerings, costs, deadlines, and SCHOLARSHIP opportunities • You may apply for the Benjamin Gilman Scholarshipi you are Pell Elligble in the March application cycle to assist with the cost of program • Ask questions directly to faculty program director, Professor T. Lang [email protected] HIGHLIGHTS • Unravel feminism and ancestral wisdom: explore socio-cultural webbings through Darija language, movement studies, and choreographic repertory. • Experience Afro-surrealism in motion: investigate Black identity within unconventional landscapes—the Souk, Agafay Desert, Essaouira Beach, and beyond. • Move through legacy: engage Marrakesh as a living archive of imagination, tracing artists like Josephine Baker who transformed foreign terrains into stages of belonging. • Create and perform: culminate your journey with a public performance merging your research, experience, and artistry. PAYMENT SCHEDULE: IST PAYMENT NOVEMBER 7TH: NONREFUNDABLE PAYMENT DEPOSIT OF $500 2ND PAYMENT DECEMBER 1ST: $1000 3RD PAYMENT JANUARY 19TH: $ 1000 4TH FINAL PROGRAM BALANCE FEBRUARY 19TH: $1480

Switch Code Imagineers Lab is an interdisciplinary research and training initiative directed by Professor T. Lang that positions Spelman and AUC students as designers, critics, and imagineers of emerging technologies. Launching 2026 Image created by @c_u_sunshine

Spelman Dance Majors/Minors and open to non-majors Movement Invention and Technology// Advanced Dance Improvisation with Professor Lang SDAN 371 CRN 95684 Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00PM - 2:15PM 1 Credit (also applies towards a wellness credit) Learn to become a Speculative Futurist in this course. You’ll be asked to imagine: What does liberation feel like in motion? What happens when Black bodies dream through code? You’ll prototype futures that don’t yet exist, building performance works and immersive experiences that speculate on healing, justice, and possible worlds. Your work becomes a kind of cultural prophecy, not just art. Register for this course, and you'll work with our SWITCH CODE BLACK IMAGINEERS FELLOWS this semester, also in collaboration with Emory University Music Department, Associate Professor Adam Mirza's Electronica Music course. #makingart #danceatspelman #switchcode #Atlanta #dance #technology #collaboration Video created by EJ Ellis and remixed by Laila Surafiel

This weekend, the students moved between written reflection, embodied research, and AI-generated visual worlds. What I am witnessing is not students “using technology"... I am watching them translate memory, movement, ancestry, rhythm, and observation into new visual languages. One student wrote: “That disconnect (ai) actually made me think a lot about who really has the right to represent a culture, and what gets lost when something as layered as identity gets filtered through a system that learned from data instead of actual lived experience.” Another created images inspired by the textures of the Souk, the geometry of prayer rugs, and the architecture of pause within movement. Their work is becoming more investigative, more layered, more honest. #danceatspelman #spelmandancexmwasi #tlangdance #blacksoulcodes

The first week of my diasporic research in performance study abroad program feels like an answered prayer. The students love the food. Every day there is another compliment, another moment at the table where somebody pauses mid-bite in disbelief. Whew!! They love our accommodations too. Truthfully, they are living well right now. I get to share with them the rhythm of how I move through summers, through touring, through the discipline and softness of this life. They are responding so beautifully to technique and repertory. In class, they keep asking for more. They remember the long phrases. They are listening deeply. They appreciate my language, the anatomical precision, the descriptive analogies, the questions that ask them to think beyond shape and into sensation. Most moving of all, they are applying feedback in real time. You can watch the body reorganize itself right in front of you. And repertory...they are devouring the movement. Owning it. Finding themselves inside of it. Our first wisdom circle with the resident elder opened something sacred. We spoke about forming community. About pioneering. About the responsibility of being first. About the weight of vision and the flexibility required to evolve, release, and honor one another through transcendence. They are grateful for the daily language classes too. They practice phrases while wandering the Souk, during excursions, even during their own little adventures to the mall or clubs with chaperones. What moves me most is how they are absorbing the texture of the language itself and bringing those textures back into the studio. New rhythms. New accents. New whispers entering the body. Today we rest. Mandatory restoration. Massages, hammams, journaling, naps by the pool, long walks through the gardens. Go sit down somewhere and be still. An answered prayer indeed. And now I wonder, in what ways will they/us evolve? Time will tell and the door is wide open! #danceatspelman #tlangdance #blacksoulcodes

Mwasi Global, in proud partnership with Spelman College’s Department of Dance Performance and Choreography, is hosting a four-week immersive Diasporic Dance and Performance Study Abroad Program led by renowned Associate Professor T. Lang, hosted in Marrakesh, Morocco. This initiative brings Spelman students into direct engagement with Moroccan communities, landscapes, and cultures, while fostering interdisciplinary creativity and global citizenship through performance art. #spelmandanceatmwasi

The sound of Black brilliance is rhythm, wisdom, and ancestral knowing.#SpelmanatMwasi

T. Lang and I have curated something deep and meaningful for these young women. They will dance, connect with nature, the people, and Africa. They will learn that while Mwasi is beautiful, it is also deeply rooted in liberation work and community building.

Sitting here at the airport with our students and honestly… I am overwhelmed. This trip to Morocco has lived in my spirit for years. There were so many moments when I questioned how it would all come together. So many twists and turns. So much work behind the scenes. But now I’m looking around and realizing God answered me. I keep thinking about the ten years of T. Lang Dance Sweatshop Summer Intensive with my dance sister Teena Marie. I think about my years with American Dance Festival. I think about all the time spent building programs, pitching ideas, teaching, choreographing, mentoring, and trying to create spaces where young people could feel seen and pushed toward excellence. All of those experiences prepared me for this moment. Now I get to take 9 students to Morocco. To Africa. To Marrakech. And I do not take the responsibility lightly. These are young lives entrusted to me. Young artists. Young thinkers. Young people who deserve to see more of the world and more of themselves. I’m emotional because this feels bigger than a trip. It feels like confirmation. Like God saying, “I heard every prayer. I saw every sacrifice. Keep going.” And will! My heart is full today. #danceatspelman #tlangdance #blacksoulcodes #switchcode

Apple + Tree. Happy Mothers' Day to my Mom and all the women who have and continue to pour into me.

I haven’t had a moment to process. Not really. I have been moving at the speed of survival, administration, invention, defense, care, teaching, grant writing, dreaming, revising, mentoring, building. And now I am preparing to go to Marrakesh with nine students and a dream team of faculty to launch the diasporic research in performance study abroad program I have carried in my spirit for years. Years. What does it mean when something imagined privately becomes institutional memory? What does it mean to watch students walk into a future you once had to argue was possible? I have not stopped long enough to praise God for this inaugural moment. I have not stopped long enough to sit with the fact that SWITCH CODE, something born from risk, experimentation, and refusal, now has seed funding to become a lab. A lab. There were moments I was too busy protecting the vision to witness the vision becoming real. Too busy answering questions designed to shrink the scope. Too busy navigating resistance from faculty who could not understand methodology outside inherited academic performance. Too busy holding students accountable to rigor, even when resistance revealed itself through avoidance, and fear. And still the work expanded. The Provost funded it. External grants funded it. Students keep arriving asking to be part of it. Something larger than me is forming. At the same time, my mother is entering a new chapter of life, and I have not had the language for the tenderness and grief moving through me around that transition. Success and sorrow have been sharing the same room. I think that is why I feel suspended. Because somewhere between movement and memory, I became someone else. Not someone seeking validation /Aries! Something steadier than that. A builder....A witness....A protector of future Black imagination. I am realizing legacy does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes legacy looks like continuing anyway. Like building while uncertain. Like trusting the vision before there was evidence. And now the evidence is everywhere. Students are arriving. The work has structure. The ideas have movement. The doors are already opening....

Jamilah... You entered rooms and confusion lost its grip. Timelines softened. Pressure became measurable. The noise arranged itself into sequence, rhythm, breath. You carried strategy like an art form. Not cold systems. Not detached leadership. But architecture with pulse. Structure with tenderness. You listened in a way that made people more honest with themselves. You made me feel clear. Not rushed toward clarity, but guided there with patience, precision, and care. You made me feel heard before I had fully found the language. You made me feel seen without performance, without proving, without defense. There are executives who manage. There are artistic directors who imagine. You did something rarer. You held vision and people with equal devotion. You became the brightest moment of my day. A steady mind. A brilliant spirit. A collaborator whose presence brought calm to complexity. Working beside you felt like standing near light, not the loud kind, the kind that helps things grow. And what you built was never only schedules, systems, notes, or meetings. You built trust. You built movement. You built conditions where possibility could stay alive. Thank you for every measured word, every thoughtful question, every moment you helped carry the shape of something still becoming. Some people leave behind completed tasks. You leave behind transformation. Thank you for your light and assistance this season. ❤️