Experience a performance, film, conversation, and book exploration relating to the exhibition Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaeton.

A Day for Dancing the Revolution includes a screening of a short film on one of the key figures of this history, Lee “Scratch” Perry. Afterwards, the director, John Corbett, discusses this film and a recently released book he also wrote, Black Ark, named after Perry’s legendary recording studio in Kingston, Jamaica. A book signing follows the events.

Also featured in this program is a performance from Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Reggaetón Lento, or “slow reggaetón,” which was originally created in 2009 and has continued to evolve over the past 17 years. By radically slowing the familiar rhythms of reggaetón, Awilda Sterling-Duprey transforms a popular dance form into an embodied meditation on memory, aging, autonomy, and resistance from an Afro-Caribbean feminist perspective.

First presented in 2009 at PARTI-DOS in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, the work was later reimagined in 2014 during the Afro-Latin@ Summer Dance Intensive at Columbia College Chicago, where it expanded through the integration of projected drawings and the artist’s interdisciplinary concept of “proformance.” Today, Reggaetón Lento continues to evolve through improvisation, responding to each site, audience, and moment while reaffirming the body as a living archive of memory, resilience, and transformation.