This second installment extends the theoretical groundwork laid in Selfpolyfication and Arriving on Choice: Africana Dance Practice Revised, by moving from the epistemological basis of selfpolyfication to its choreographic, structural, and performative implications. Where the first submission foregrounded the ontological and kinetic principles underpinning the selfpolyfication system—especially in relation to diasporic urgency, rhythmic acumen, and relational presence—this continuation positions selfpolyfication as a generative compositional methodology. It elaborates how selfpolyfication structures movement probability, choreographic unfolding, and relational performance design.
In this second offering, the central question is no longer only “what is selfpolyfication,” but rather, “what does selfpolyfication allow us to choreograph, structure, and generate?” The framing pivots from phenomenological insight toward compositional praxis. Selfpolyfication is presented here not as an aesthetic description, but as a recursive design principle: one that organizes probability, response, and emergence across choreographic systems.
Rather than treating choreography as a fixed arrangement of steps or sequences, this work positions it as a probability field—an energetic terrain within which movement emerges, not as a repetition of form but as a recursive engagement with future-making. In this schema, choreography is structured through dynamic negotiations between kinetic foresight, rhythmic anticipation, and communal response. Dancers are not tasked with executing sequences, but with shaping the gravitational probabilities of movement and rhythm before they fully arrive.
Where the first paper theorized selfpolyfication as an intra-communal, improvisational, and kinetic epistemology, this second paper formalizes how that epistemology becomes structure—how it gives rise to choreographic scores, performance systems, and live compositional strategies that remain coherent without being static. The movement vocabulary is no longer a container for choice-making; it is the outcome of a system that trains the dancer to be structurally adaptive, relationally attuned, and temporally anticipatory.
In short, this paper reframes selfpolyfication as a method for choreographic emergence. It expands from a philosophy of embodied multiplicity to a technology of movement orchestration. Philosophy of embodied multiplicity, in this context, refers to the conceptual grounding that treats the dancer not as a single, unified agent executing fixed movements, but as a multiply-present, rhythmically intelligent being capable of operating across overlapping centers of intention, memory, and motion. It affirms the dancer’s capacity to hold and activate simultaneous temporalities, relational vectors, and rhythmic potentials within the body without collapse or contradiction.
Here, embodiment is not singular or linear—it is recursive, polycentric, and generative. Multiplicity refers both to the layers the body holds (cultural, historical, spiritual, kinetic) and the multiple choreographic futures it navigates and initiates. This philosophy treats the body as a site of intersecting probabilities rather than static execution, and it sees choreography not as an imposed form but as a system generated through the dancer’s capacity to hold, translate, and mobilize these multiplicities in motion. It is this philosophy that underpins selfpolyfication and allows it to evolve into a choreographic system rather than remain a descriptive concept.
To do this, the paper moves in seven parts:
From Concept to Choreographic System situates the paper as a continuation and deepening of the previous work, outlining how selfpolyfication becomes a structuring force for choreography, composition, and performance rather than remaining a descriptive or theoretical proposition.
Probability-Based Composition introduces the theory of kinetic probability fields and movement forecasting, demonstrating how the selfpolyfied body negotiates emergent rhythms and spatial tension points in real time, composing through attunement rather than pre-design.
Arriving on Action theorizes the co-manifestation of rhythm and movement as a temporal phenomenon, foregrounding their simultaneous emergence through shared anticipatory fields between dancer and drummer in Afro-Diasporic performance systems.
Polycentricity and the Talawa Weight Intention System details the technical foundations of polycentric training, showing how anatomical differentiation and directional force become the basis for kinetic foresight and alignment with probabilistic structures.
Improvisation Beyond Improvisation articulates rhythmokinetic extemporation as a compositional methodology that exceeds Western notions of improvisation, recasting spontaneity as structured choice-making grounded in rhythmic memory, proprioceptive timing, and communal logic.
Polytemporal Kinetofields and Temporal Fractals explores how time is recursively structured within selfpolyfication, showing how dancers navigate overlapping temporalities, generate fractal phrasework, and project layered time through corpoprojected scenography.
Selfpolyfication as a Technology of World-Building closes the paper by positioning selfpolyfication as a cosmological and compositional system that structures not only movement, but reality itself—affirming presence, difference, recursion, and future-making as core choreographic materials.
Taken together, these sections advance selfpolyfication not as a finite model, but as a recursive practice that structures choreographic thinking, designs dynamic relational systems, and generates future-forming motion within and beyond performance contexts. This continuation is thus not a supplement to the first paper, but a deepening of it: an attempt to hold the selfpolyfied body not only as an expressive site of multiplicity, but also as a design system capable of real-time structuring, orchestration, and transformation.
Centers in Polycentric Movement
Polycentric movement is defined by the capacity to articulate multiple anatomical centers simultaneously or in sequence, with each center possessing its own rhythmic logic, directional force, and temporal behavior. Rather than organizing movement around a single point of initiation, polycentric technique distributes agency across several zones of the body, enabling recursive phrasework, rhythmic layering, and compositional complexity. Within the selfpolyfied system, these centers do not merely move—they route energy, transmit rhythm, and participate in polytemporal structuring. Their differentiation and coordination form the foundation of kinetic foresight and groove-based design.
Core Centers in Polycentric Motion Include:
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Neck
The cervical spine acts as a fine-tuning instrument for temporal delay, gestural punctuation, and directional redirection. It can initiate counter-rhythms or serve as the terminal site for extended wave-like energy routed from below.
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Shoulders
The scapulothoracic region offers horizontal and diagonal phrasing, facilitating torsional spirals, rhythmic recoil, and tension-release dynamics. Shoulder isolation often functions as an upper-body counterpart to pelvic groove anchoring, contributing to polyrhythmic layering.
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Wrists
Operating at the extremities, the wrists amplify or interrupt phrase endings. They are micro-articulators of time, used to finesse gesture, generate rhythmic contrast, and produce flicks, tremors, or pulses that serve as sonic or visual accents.
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Spine
The spinal column—particularly its thoracic and lumbar regions—is a central transmission corridor for distributing energy upward and downward. It enables kinetic modulation through undulation, wave articulation, and spiraling. The spine often serves as a bridge between grounded pelvic motion and lifted gestural expression.
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Hips
The pelvis is a generative engine for directional force, torque, and gravity negotiation. As a major power center, it anchors weight, initiates propulsion, and generates rhythmic integrity through looped motion and torque-based modulation.
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Ankles
The ankles provide rebound, suspension, and shock absorption, acting as the interface between the body and the ground. Their subtle articulation governs bounce, drop, and directional shifts. They are essential to sustaining rhythmic recursion in both standing and grounded movement vocabularies.
Each of these centers possesses the capacity to operate independently or in dynamic relation with others. Their interplay enables selfpolyfication to unfold choreographically: movement generated through layered timing, differentiated initiation, and recursive recombination. Polycentric training refines the dancer’s proprioceptive intelligence, developing the capacity to monitor and shape force across multiple trajectories without collapsing into uniformity or confusion.
The ethical dimension of polycentric training lies in its affirmation of multiplicity without hierarchy. No single center is prioritized at the expense of others; instead, the dancer cultivates an internal listening practice that allows each center to contribute based on compositional need, rhythmic pressure, or groove logic. This distributed agency becomes foundational for navigating PolyProbable fields, composing through foresight, and routing rhythm through time.
Polycentricity is not merely a stylistic feature of Africana dance—it is a structuring logic. When mastered within the selfpolyfication system, it enables dancers to move as compositional systems, routing rhythm, generating recursive structure, and projecting world-building motion from multiple centers in concert.
Probability-Based Composition: Designing Movement Through Kinetic Forecasting
Selfpolyfication, when advanced beyond its improvisational and identity-expanding functions, reveals itself as a composition methodology premised on real-time probability negotiation. In this framework, the dancer does not simply respond to what is; they forecast what is becoming. Movement is no longer choreographed through pre-scripted sequences, but through the deliberate shaping of kinetic probability fields—zones of anticipated emergence where rhythm, intention, and presence converge to produce motion that is structurally sound yet improvisationally alive. This is not guesswork. It is a form of kinetic intelligence rooted in diasporic time systems, where rhythm operates not as a fixed metronome but as a constellation of relational pulses—each one recalibrating the gravitational pull of the next possible action. When I’ve presented this work, colleagues outside of Africana frameworks—particularly those familiar with Erin Manning’s (2009) notion of preacceleration or Brian Massumi’s (2002) writing on the virtual and emergent—have drawn comparisons. But what is at stake here is fundamentally different. In the Africana context, this is not a matter of speculative abstraction, but of intergenerationally transmitted skill. This is a culturally embedded aesthetic logic, where codes of rhythm and motion are lived, legible, and actionable. These are systems through which movement is read, generated, and recomposed—where proprioceptive acuity and rhythmic decision-making are cultivated as part of communal knowledge. It is not theoretical philosophy; it is dance in direct motion—rhythmic action as a compositional method.
This model draws from principles already embedded in Africana movement systems. In many traditions, the dancer is never entirely reacting or entirely initiating; they are forecasting. They move in alignment with the most likely next energy, the most anticipated shift in weight, and the most probable emergence of sound. This forecasting is not cognitive in the Western sense—it is proprioceptive, rhythmic, and communal. The body “reads” the room, the beat, the energy of those around it, and calibrates toward a next action that does not yet exist, but is already beginning to form.
This is not guesswork. It is a form of kinetic intelligence rooted in diasporic time systems, where rhythm is not a metronome but a field of relational pulses—each one altering the gravitational pull of the next possible action. Dancers trained in selfpolyfication operate not within static choreographic containers, but inside dynamic fields of tension, possibility, and interruption. They do not “hit” steps—they arrive into them as probabilities materializing through movement.
In this model, choreography shifts from the domain of planned execution to that of designed anticipation. It becomes an act of rhythmic scaffolding—structuring the field of future options rather than scripting precise movement events.
The Kinetic Probability Field
The concept of a kinetic probability field redefines the choreographic environment as a space of dynamic emergence. Instead of mapping discrete steps onto bodies and space, this approach identifies zones of energetic convergence—places where movement is likely to occur due to accumulated weight, relational tension, spatial necessity, or rhythmic density. These zones are not fixed. They move with the dancer, change with the rhythm, and respond to communal shifts in energy. The skilled performer does not impose movement onto the field—they tune into its gravitational currents.
For example:
In a cypher, the shift in crowd energy might signal an imminent change in dynamic, prompting the dancer to invert their orientation or increase amplitude.
In a ritual setting, the layering of drum patterns may generate a kinetic pull toward a particular plane of movement (e.g., low-to-ground footwork or upper-body isolations).
In a contemporary improvisational duet, the micro-gestures of a partner’s breath or spine may signal a shared arc of motion before it is explicitly initiated.
In each of these cases, the movement is not chosen at random—it emerges from a sensing of kinetic pressure points and a capacity to forecast the next most meaningful action.
This is the essence of probability-based composition: Movement does not follow a script; it follows a field. The dancer becomes a navigator of potentialities, a curator of choices that have not yet occurred, but are already gesturing toward arrival.
Forecasting vs. Executing
The shift from execution to forecasting requires a different kind of compositional training. Rather than learning what to do, the dancer must learn how to listen to what is about to happen. This listening is not passive—it is active, embodied, and forward-moving. It demands a trained sensitivity to:
Weight trajectories (where is the mass of the body already headed?)
Rhythmic implication (what pattern is the drum about to resolve or shift into?)
Spatial compression (which directions are becoming saturated and which are opening?)
Communal energy shifts (what signals are being given by the witnessing body or other dancers?)
Through this, forecasting becomes a form of choreographic authorship. The dancer composes the next action not by inserting it, but by arriving where it is already most likely to happen. In this way, selfpolyfication functions as a kinetic design system—not forcing movement into existence, but shaping the conditions under which movement arises with inevitability.
Reconfiguring Choreographic Space
Traditional choreography often treats space as a grid—divided into front, back, left, right, center, diagonal—with movement plotted along these axes. Probability-based composition, by contrast, treats space as a responsive terrain—a topography of relational tensions. Movement emerges not because it is assigned to a space, but because space demands or invites it.
This spatial logic mirrors African cosmological traditions where time and space are not linear or Cartesian, but relational and cyclical. In these systems, motion arises where spiritual, energetic, or ancestral currents converge. The body does not move “on time” or “on count”; it moves because a shift in the field requires it. In turn, the field shifts again in response to the movement, in a recursive spiral of emergence and response.
Compositional Implications
The implications of PolyProbable-based composition (Prestø) are architectural, rhythmic, and pedagogical. In this model, choreography is not constructed through prescribed sequences, but through the shaping of a PolyProbable field—a dynamic terrain in which certain movements, combinations, and timings become more probable due to the polycentric and polyrhythmic structures already in play.
Codes function as gravitational matrices rather than inventories of steps. They do not merely contain prior movement; they condition the emergence of future motion through the interplay of anatomical centers, rhythmic demands, and relational cues.
Rehearsal becomes the development of relational and rhythmic foresight—training the dancer not to recall movement, but to tune into emergent conditions and probabilities.
Improvisation is not a break from structure—it is structure in motion. It is the compositional method through which dancers navigate and sculpt the PolyProbable field.
Precision is recalibrated as temporal accuracy within the field of probability—not as the perfect execution of preset steps, but as the high-quality arrival into kinetically and rhythmically plausible configurations.
For example, when the hips and chest are both active as polycentric centers, the likelihood of simultaneous forward motion is biomechanically low. The hips retreat as the chest advances, and vice versa—each center negotiating against the other. This creates a probabilistic logic: The field favors certain oppositional flows over others, based on how anatomical structures articulate under rhythmic pressure. If both centers increase in tempo, this narrows the set of viable pathways; if one center slows while the other syncs to a different metronome, new possibilities open. The PolyProbable field is therefore not fixed—it is in constant flux, shaped by choices, timings, and the rhythmic environment, both internal and external.
Dancers trained in this methodology do not prepare to remember—they prepare to perceive. They rehearse the skill of forecasting—learning how to identify which combinations are becoming most probable and when to intervene, delay, intensify, or redirect. Codes are practiced not to fix motion but to stabilize the emergence of structure under pressure. They serve simultaneously as archives of rhythmic memory and generators of future configuration.
Extemporation and choreography within this framework follow a logic grounded in polycentric and polyrhythmic intelligence. What may appear as improvisation is, in fact, intentional choice-making within the constraints and affordances of the PolyProbable field. It is not improvisation as understood in Western paradigms—rooted in rupture, spontaneity, or stylistic deviation—but rather a compositional act shaped by anatomical negotiation, rhythmic inheritance, and inter-relational attunement.
In this paradigm, choreography and extemporation are not distinct categories but co-emergent processes. Both arise through the recursive structuring of polycentric motion and rhythmic probability. The dancer listens to the “gravitational” logics of the field, responds to emerging tensions, and activates motion not from memory or pre-script, but from rhythmic foresight and proprioceptive acuity. Movement does not follow a script—it follows a field. In motion, the body becomes the composer.
Embodying Conditions: Individuation, Groove, and Rhythmic Integrity
Hence, two dancers performing the same sequence are actively structuring the conditions that move them through it—or rather, structuring the conditions through which the sequence moves through them—rather than making the body assume certain shapes by holding them. In this model, the shape is not the starting point; it is the residue, the echo of energy having been directed, routed, and released through the body’s unique centers and timings. To dance is not to arrive at form, but to configure the internal and external conditions that make that form probable.
This shaping of probability to execute and populate a choreographic code is part of what generates textural individuation—the small differences in groove, phrasing, and rhythmic integrity that emerge even when the same movement vocabulary is shared. These differences are not deviations or imperfections; they are evidence of each dancer’s distinct relationship to polycentric gravity, anatomical torque, proprioceptive timing, and groove ethics.
Take, for instance, a simple lateral undulation—a wave that moves across the ribcage, hips, and spine. In a Western codified technique, this might be taught as a fixed pathway with a clear spatial goal and a set rhythm. In the PolyProbable framework, however, what matters is not how the shape looks but how it is generated: how the hips ground to produce a counterforce; how the sternum responds to the pelvic tilt; how the shoulders delay or accelerate that energy; and how the groove—shared or internal—pulls the motion forward or lets it hang.
Now imagine two dancers performing that same undulation. One may route more of the energy through the lumbar spine, allowing for a wider lateral curve. Another may anchor more in the clavicle and delay the shoulder response, creating a groove that hangs longer before resolving. Both are “doing” the same motion, but the conditions they have activated are different: different force vectors, different timing logics, and different internal resistances and releases. What results is not visual sameness, but choreographic integrity through difference.
This is because in this system, the movement is not the shape—it is the relational field that produces the shape. The dancer’s job is not to hit the shape identically, but to intelligently accommodate the conditions that allow the movement to arrive. This includes attention to torque, counterbalance, delay, suspension, breath, speed, rhythmic inheritance, and communal pulse. What may be perceived as “style” or “flavor” is in fact the visible trace of individualized probability negotiation.
Thus, two bodies moving in apparent unison may in fact be solving entirely different anatomical and rhythmic problems. The same movement, populated through different probability fields, generates a differentiated groove—a divergence that is not dissonant, but deeply musical. This is where the concept of groove-as-structure becomes central. Groove, in this framework, is not a byproduct of rhythm; it is the felt logic of how rhythm is being routed, delayed, or released through the body’s architecture. It is the point where structure and improvisation no longer oppose each other, but become co-extensive.
The concept becomes especially clear when we look at repeated movement phrases in Africana traditions, such as a soca bounce, a Djembe phrase, or a West African traveling step. The steps repeat, yes, but each repetition is a new event. The groove is recalibrated each time. The body prepares the conditions—by adjusting weight, altering breath, and anticipating rhythmic breaks—and then populates that field differently, depending on how the internal and external environments have shifted. This is what gives soca its swing, dancehall its torque, krump its ruptural flow, and traditional drum-dance forms their recursive depth. The repetition is not mechanical—it is an opportunity to re-solve the relationship between intention, energy, and form.
This is why groove, in PolyProbable composition, is both an aesthetic and epistemic signature. It is the trace of intelligent decision-making inside the field. And this is why, in Africana dance systems, exact unison is neither required nor desirable. What is valued is coherence within difference—the ability to hold a shared rhythmic proposition while expressing it through the body’s particular relationship to force, speed, weight, and memory.
Moreover, this framework produces a pedagogy of accountable individuation. Students are not taught to mimic external form, but to become aware of their own kinetic landscape—how their chest responds to back pressure, how their knees rebound under compression, how their breath modifies tempo, and how their rhythm is pulled or delayed by a neighbor’s motion. They are taught to sense probability, not to execute choreography. The goal is not uniformity—it is polyphonic coherence. It is about dancers being in relation to the same code while embodying it through distinct anatomical logic.
In this way, PolyProbable-based composition does not flatten difference; it activates it as compositional material. And groove becomes the medium through which these differences are harmonized—not standardized. It is a structure that breathes, adapts, and listens.
Ultimately, this is a choreography of becoming, not fixing. Each repetition is a return, yes—but a return that spirals forward, not in place. The dancer does not repeat to conform, but to re-engage the field. This is what gives the movement its swing quality—the temporal elasticity and propulsive feel that comes not from trying to look the same, but from arriving at shared rhythm through differently prepared conditions. It is the dance of starting over, not to copy, but to continue.
Arriving on Action: The Co-manifestation of Rhythm and Movement
To arrive on action is not to act out a plan, nor to react to an external cue. It is to manifest movement and rhythm simultaneously, before either one has been fully declared. This is a temporal logic of co-creation, where rhythm and motion converge not in sequence (as cause and effect), but in synchronicity. In the framework of selfpolyfication, Arriving on Action occurs when the dancer and the musician share the same anticipatory field—when they do not merely meet in rhythm, but become rhythm itself, each shaping the future motion of the other.
The concept of Arriving on Action is best understood as a collapse of temporal hierarchy: neither sound leads nor follows movement; neither intention precedes nor succeeds execution. Instead, both emerge from a shared kinetic probability field. The dancer is not performing choreography to music. The drummer is not playing accompaniment to a dancer. They are both reading the same shift in weight, the same tilt in gravity, the same tremor in communal attention, and acting with aligned foresight. They meet at the moment before movement becomes visible or audible—when it is still only a pressure, a leaning, an echo of what is about to arrive.
Bobby McFerrin: Sonic Improvisation as Rhythmic Forecasting
Bobby McFerrin’s live performances offer a striking sonic analogy to this principle. He does not merely sing a melody or perform a song; he builds an entire rhythmic–melodic–textural world in real time, often with nothing but his voice, body, and audience. But more importantly, he does not compose linearly—he composes probabilistically. He does not just sing what he wants to say; he sings what is about to be said, what the breath of the moment is already suggesting. He arrives on action.
In performance, McFerrin is perpetually one breath ahead of the sound, one lilt ahead of the phrase. His vocal improvisations are not random explorations—they are structured anticipations. Whether shifting between bass thumps, falsetto arpeggios, or midline scat riffs, he listens not only to what he is singing, but to what is becoming necessary. He intuits the next shape, the next tonal direction, and lets it emerge through what might be called a melodic forecast—an act of sonic arrival that is structurally parallel to the dancer’s arrival on action.
This anticipatory logic becomes even more visible in his collaborations with audiences. In the famous demonstration at the World Science Festival, McFerrin (“Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus.” World Science Festival, 2009) invites the audience to sing a scale by jumping across the stage. With minimal instruction, he gestures to a spatial location, and the audience sings the corresponding pitch—without being told what the pitch is. Then, he leaps to a new, unmarked location, and the audience sings the next logical note before he lands. No pitch is spoken, no notes are assigned—but everyone knows, feels, what must come next.
This is Arriving on Action: The moment when a communal field of probability becomes so strong that rhythm and response collapse into simultaneity. The moment where movement and music coalesce before either has solidified into form. The moment of shared foresight.
Embodied Foresight as Compositional Technique
In Africana dance contexts, this co-manifestation is not a trick—it is a trained sensitivity. It is how dancers and musicians have worked together for generations in both sacred and secular contexts. In a Kassé break, for instance, the drummer does not wait for the dancer to finish a phrase before playing the break. They sense the dancer’s shift in weight, the uptick in energy, the emerging need for rupture—and the break arrives exactly when it should, often before the dancer has visibly cued it. Likewise, the dancer begins the Kassé move not when the break is played, but when it is about to be played.
This co-creation emerges from an entangled field of kinetic, spatial, and spiritual information. It is not controlled by notation or pre-arrangement, but by embodied memory and trained foresight. In this system, choreography is not scored ahead of time. It is manifested in motion, in real-time, through sensitivity to the next-most-likely unfolding.
Sonic-Kinetic Forecasting: A Shared Architecture
The dancer and the musician, in Arriving on Action, share an architecture of anticipation:
Weight: Both are attuned to where the energy is leaning—not just physically, but emotionally and atmospherically.
Pause: Silence or stillness is not emptiness, but a zone of intensified probability, where the next action is being shaped.
Edge: The leading edge of movement or sound is where the field is most active. Both dancer and musician hover there, together, waiting for the next convergence.
Breath: The in-breath before a movement or phrase carries as much information as the gesture itself. Breath becomes a metric of probability—an indicator of intention on the cusp of action.
Bobby McFerrin operates in this zone. So do dancers in the cypher. So do drummers and stilt walkers in ritual processions. They are not just responding to each other—they are forecasting with each other. Their improvisation is not invention; it is arrival at what was already becoming necessary.
No Lag Between Intention and Execution
To arrive on action is to remove the lag between intention and execution. This is only possible when rhythm and movement are not external to the body, but internalized—when they function as structuring forces within the performer. This is why dancers trained in Africana systems often “feel” the next moment coming, even when the music has not yet shifted. They are moving inside a time field that is relational, not metronomic.
This is also why improvisation in these systems never appears hesitant or exploratory in the Western sense. It is confident, grounded, and already in motion before it begins. The dancer does not test the rhythm—they land in it as if it had always been there. The improvisation is not open-ended—it is exact, precise, and anticipated, emerging not from freedom alone, but from deep alignment with the kinetic probability field.
Bobby McFerrin and Kinetic Coherence
When McFerrin sings, gestures, claps, and leans into silence, he is not just making music—he is choreographing attention. His vocal lines spiral like limbs; his rhythms collapse and expand like a torso pulsing with beat. His body and voice arrive on action together, not one supporting the other but both functioning as co-generative systems. In this way, he models the same relational foresight that dancers trained in selfpolyfication cultivate—not to perform form, but to generate emergent structure from shared probability.
Whether it is McFerrin inviting an audience into harmonic convergence, or a dancer responding to the imminent weight drop of a bass note, Arriving on Action requires trust in the structure that is not yet visible. It demands the capacity to act as if the future is already here. Because in these traditions, it is.
Probability Structures and Weight Pathways
Polycentric Movement as the Engine of Predictive Navigation
In the probability field of selfpolyfication, choreography is not a fixed map but a gravitational terrain—a mutable space where movement outcomes emerge in real time based on rhythmic, relational, and spatial pressures. To move effectively within this terrain, the dancer must operate with a polycentric body, one capable of routing weight, intention, and rhythm through multiple anatomical centers simultaneously.
Polycentricity is not simply the presence of multiple movement centers—it is the structuring logic that enables the dancer to navigate multiple kinetic potentials without collapsing into confusion or over-articulation. It ensures that each part of the body—hips, chest, spine, shoulders, feet, head—remains both autonomous and relational, able to negotiate its own rhythmic logic while contributing to an integrated whole. In this sense, polycentricity is the body’s method of aligning with the field of probability: a live, anatomical system for attuning to and shaping future movement events.
Polycentric Routing: The Architecture of Choreographic Foresight
Movement within Africana choreographic systems emerges from a logic of distributed agency, where no single center dominates, and multiple articulatory sites contribute to the generation and modulation of rhythm.
Africana movement systems distribute agency across several articulation points. In polycentric routing, each center is tuned to a distinct rhythmic or energetic logic. The hips may be in one rhythmic cycle while the shoulders spiral in another. The head accents on a syncopated delay, while the feet initiate grounding pulses that do not necessarily align with the upper body phrasing. These simultaneous and contradictory impulses do not create chaos; rather, they construct a rhythmic lattice, a scaffolding for probabilistic movement emergence.
Fractured Gravity: Negotiating Multiple Weight Centers in Time
Selfpolyfication within a polycentric system often results in fractured gravity—a state in which the body’s centers are no longer unified under a single downbeat or directional impulse. Instead, each center negotiates its own weight logic, creating a dancing body that vibrates across different rhythmic polarities. In this condition:
The hips may suspend while the knees drive downward.
The chest may lift in refusal while the feet anchor in submission.
The spine may ripple forward while the neck retracts into a held stillness.
This fragmentation is not dysfunction—it is intelligence. It reveals a body that does not collapse into the most obvious motion, but instead explores divergent gravitational pulls, amplifying the choreographic potential of the moment. Within the probability field, fractured gravity is foresight. It allows the dancer to extend a movement sequence by delaying weight commitment, testing multiple possibilities before selecting one.
Tunneling Between Centers: How Polycentricity Enables Probability Transitions
When the dancer moves from one center to another—say, shifting from a hip-driven motion into a shoulder-led gesture—they are tunneling through the probability field. This tunneling is not random; it is structured by momentum, rhythm, and collective response. The dancer’s spine becomes the channel between centers, directing energy with precision so that the body does not follow rhythm but precedes it.
Importantly, the spine in this context does not function as a “core” in the Eurocentric sense of singular control or centralized origin. It is not the generator of motion, but rather a transmission corridor—a facilitator of energetic redirection across centers. It enables the polycentric body to remain responsive and recursive, without reinstating a hierarchy of movement initiation. The spine serves not as a command center, but as a dynamic bridge—helping organize the passage of force and intention across multiple articulatory sites.
In ritual tunneling, described earlier, the dancer departs from their ordinary consciousness through deep entrainment. In polycentric tunneling, the departure is anatomical—the body slips through layered weight intentions, generating movement sequences that feel both inevitable and unpredictable.
To the audience, this creates the impression that the dancer is being moved by something larger, yet never losing authorship. This is the tension of selfpolyfication: surrendering to rhythmic inevitability without relinquishing agency. And it is the polycentric body—not a singular core-driven one—that makes this navigation possible.
Soca and Calypso as Polycentric Probability Fields
In Calypso and its contemporary acceleration, Soca, the body responds to a tempo that often exceeds cognitive planning—relying instead on the polycentric reflexes of a trained anatomical system. These genres, rooted in the Trinidadian carnival continuum, are sonic and kinetic terrains where tempo, torque, and tension collide. Movement emerges not from choreographic prescription but from the body’s capacity to channel energy across multiple centers while maintaining aesthetic coherence.
In a typical Soca sequence, the ankles function as shock absorbers and propulsive engines. They respond to the percussive thrust of the riddim, bending and releasing energy that feeds upward through the knees and hips. The hips, meanwhile, do not merely oscillate for decorative effect—they are the site of rhythmic conversation, transmitting torque into the pelvis, which may move in opposition to or sync with the knees. The shoulder blades function as a separate articulation zone, creating diagonal or offset spirals that ripple against the propulsion of the lower body. The neck accents and punctuates motion, often delaying its snap or extension to create rhythmic drag or counterpoint. Finally, the wrists introduce micro-rhythmic interruptions—flicks, flourishes, and gestures that activate the surface of the rhythm like a steelpan roll at the edge of a chorus.
This is not “freestyling” in a loose, improvisational sense—it is kinetic calculation. The dancer is not selecting steps from a mental archive—they are feeling for gravitational pull across centers, choosing how and when to commit weight, which articulation to tunnel through, and how to delay resolution to stretch time.
What appears spontaneous is, in fact, a complex structure of rhythmic anticipation—a body trained to listen for emergent probability and respond with polycentric logic. In this way, Soca and Calypso offer more than cultural expression—they provide a high-speed testing ground for probability-based movement emergence, where fractured gravity, anatomical tunneling, and rhythmic delay are all deployed to heighten communal pleasure, presence, and aesthetic intensity.
Rhythmokinetic Extemporation as Compositional Method
Solving for Space, Holding Groove, and Sharing Time Under Conditions of Compression
Once a dancer internalizes probability-based movement through the coordination of their centers—hips, ankles, shoulder blades, wrists, spine, and neck—they begin to navigate not only their own body’s spatialtemporal field, but also the shared groove space that emerges when bodies move in relation to one another. This is not choreographed unison. This is not mimicry. This is not a fixed formation. This is what we now name the Polycentric Groove Field—a shared kinetic ecology where multiple dancers negotiate rhythm, weight, and relational presence together, each moving from their own center while co-generating “we-time.”
Unlike the polyphonic field, which implies discrete voices, the Polycentric Groove Field is a relational system of attuned bodies, a structure held not by individual rhythms but by interlocked groove. Groove is not personal. It is social. It is not a possession. It is a gift. To have groove is to give it—to offer rhythmic certainty to others, to co-generate shared timing, to stabilize the unpredictability of collective improvisation.
Groove as a Relational Entity: “to Have Is to Give”
In Africana dance systems, groove is not internal—it is externalized and shared. If you appear to “have” groove, it is because your body makes groove legible and feelable to others. Groove is not something witnessed; it is something entered. This is why we speak not only of groove, but of the groove field—a space where dancers synchronize their rhythmokinetic intelligences to establish collective pulse. It is in this context that the individual probability field expands and connects with others, producing a polycentric system of timing, orientation, weight distribution, and energy flow.
Groove is the only thing that allows bodies—each with their own rhythmic and spatial logics—to move together without sameness. The groove does not ask for uniformity; it offers a temporal foundation that others can push against, sink into, or hover just behind. It is not rigid; it breathes. It pulses across bodies, producing not a beat, but a shared kinetic forecast—the anticipation of what might come next, held in the rhythmic logic of the present.
This is the beginning of choreography in selfpolyfication: not the arrangement of shapes in space, but the convergence of rhythmokinetic probability fields into “we-time”—a shared temporality where every movement extends the groove, offers it, and asks for response.
Solving for Space: Compression as Choreographic Architect
Africana dance traditions are forged under conditions of compression. The groove field does not emerge in open, individualized space. It emerges where dancers must solve for space in real time—in the Bantaba, in carnival bands, in krump sessions, in block parties, in Afrobeat concerts, in Yoruba processions, in dancehall jams, and in Soca road marches. Here, movement is never isolated. It is always already surrounded by other bodies, other grooves, and other urgencies.
In these compressed spaces:
Dancers must curate weight and direction with care, initiating torque without full range.
Phrasing is micro-looped, using minimal space to generate maximal effect.
Motion is adaptive—a ripple redirected, a spin cut short, a bounce folded inward.
Spatial negotiation becomes part of the aesthetic—tightness becomes intentional density.
These conditions do not limit the choreography—they structure it. The groove field intensifies under compression. The dancer must not only move, but do so in a way that is legible, rhythmic, and responsive to those immediately beside them.
This is what creates the choreographic texture of Carnival bands, Soca fetes, and packed street cyphers: The aesthetic is born from collective proximity. Everyone is making the groove visible. Everyone is anchoring others’ sense of time. Every small movement—ankle roll, shoulder pulse, wrist flick—is doing rhythmic labor. The groove field is not a backdrop; it is the medium through which presence becomes choreography.
The Bantaba as Ancestral Model of the Polycentric Groove Field
Traditionally, the Bantaba refers to a central gathering place in Mandé-speaking West African villages—a communal platform for discussion, decision-making, ritual, and dance. In the Diaspora, the term has evolved to describe a shared dance space where community-based learning, rhythmic exchange, and stylistic dialogue take place—a gathering site for a living community of practice. The Bantaba is not only a circle. It is a compressed energy zone where groove is held in the feet, hips, and clavicles of a community. It is an ancestral groove field where dancers do not perform for an audience—they move within the energy spiral of others. Here, groove is an ethical force: It compels generosity, affirmation, listening, and relational timing. If your movement cannot be heard by others—if it does not enter the groove field—it is not yet a contribution.
This becomes the ethical structure of selfpolyfication in communal space:
Groove must be given to be received.
The dancer’s job is not to dazzle, but to maintain the field.
Virtuosity emerges not from complexity, but from the consistency with which groove is shared and expanded.
Thus, choreography in the groove field is never imposed—it is emergent. It arises from the refined generosity of dancers who choose timing, phrasing, and gesture in response to others.
Choreographic Parallax: Staging the Memory of Compression
Even when released from compression, the groove field remains imprinted in the body. Dancers trained in Carnival, Soca, or the Bantaba carry the tactical intelligence of crowd choreography into staged work. They move through open space, but with an awareness of ghosts—the elbow that would be there, the shoulder that would have brushed past, the need to spiral tighter, land earlier, or hold a beat longer.
This is choreographic parallax—where staged movement is shaped by remembered conditions of density. Even on a large proscenium, the body still solves for space it no longer occupies:
Weight is shifted with readiness, not certainty.
Movement favors looping over elongation—built for shared timing, not spectacle.
Phrasework retains its counter-directionality, shaped by necessity, not abstraction.
Choreography built from the groove field holds a tension between abundance and limitation, between the solitary and the collective. The dancer becomes a node in an invisible system, anchoring time not for themselves, but for an imagined crowd.
Polytemporal Kinetofields and Temporal Fractals
Structuring Time Through Recursive Motion and Corpoprojected Resonance
Within the selfpolyfication system, time is not a neutral background against which motion unfolds—it is an elastic, activated field co-produced by the dancer’s rhythmic decisions, anatomical centers, and shared groove with others. This dynamic structuring of time is best articulated through the concept of polytemporal kinetofields, a term I coined in 2024 in my doctoral dissertation to describe the layered kinetic possibility fields generated through Africana dance motion. These fields are not abstract metaphors. They are lived temporal architectures, constructed and deconstructed in real time by dancers trained to occupy multiple rhythm signatures simultaneously.
Polytemporal Kinetofields as Structuring Grounds
Polytemporal kinetofields emerge from the entangled relationship between groove, proprioceptive anticipation, and recursive phrasing. They are not merely time signatures in motion—they are time-worlds with their own internal logics. Dancers who selfpolyfy do not follow a linear beat; they navigate through a constellation of temporal zones, phasing between ancestral invocations, present negotiations, and emergent anticipations. Each limb, each weight shift, each spiraling contraction or suspended tremor contributes to a composite time-logic that is shared, unstable, and deeply responsive.
To speak of a dancer being “in time” in this context is to fundamentally misunderstand the temporality at play. The selfpolyfied dancer moves not in time, but with, against, around, and through time. They generate recursive loops—temporal fractals—where movement phrases fold back on themselves with variation, mutation, and re-entry.
Temporal Fractals: Kinetic Recursion as Temporal Intelligence
Fractality, in this context, refers to the recursive repetition of pattern at different scales. In polytemporal kinetofields, fractality is not visual but kinetic. A bounce in the knee may echo a spiral in the spine; a wrist flick may anticipate a hip phrase yet to arrive. These are not embellishments—they are functional time-extensions. Each fractal phrase creates a micro-cycle within a larger timefield, offering entry points for other dancers to sync, stretch, or subvert.
Take, for example, a dancer navigating a Soca riddim. Their knees may bounce on the double while their pelvis loops a cross-rhythm against the downbeat. The shoulders swing in delayed time against both. The wrists spiral micro-gestures that function as rhythmic punctuations—not simply flourishes, but scalar time references. In this polytemporal arrangement, the body becomes an ensemble of time-makers. The result is not additive rhythm, but interlaced time: each center operates as its own temporal site, forming a recursive architecture of rhythmic resonance.
This is what allows the body to echo itself while evolving—to return without repetition, to spiral without collapse, to build complexity without contradiction. The dancer becomes a temporal architect, designing time not in meters, but through fractal recurrence and improvisational phase shifts.
Polytemporal Self-Accompaniment as the Core Logic of Polycentric Motion
Within the selfpolyfying framework, polycentricity is not only anatomical—it is temporal. A dancer trained in selfpolyfication engages in a compositional practice of self-accompaniment, in which different centers of the body operate with distinct timing logics, yet converge in shared rhythmic events. This generates a polytemporal architecture in which actions initiated in the past arrive alongside actions generated in the present, creating the illusion of simultaneity while preserving layered temporal depth.
A useful analogy for this structure is water drumming. In many African and diasporic traditions, the hand striking the surface of the water creates an immediate sound; the hand plunging below the surface generates a delayed acoustic response; and the creation of air pockets beneath the water produces yet another sound that emerges moments later. These distinct sounds—though initiated at different times—are perceived together by an outside listener. The water drummer thus accompanies themselves across temporalities. They initiate events whose consequences unfold in the future, even as they perform alongside their past actions in the audible present. This is a live, embodied polytemporality in which temporal layering becomes structural and perceptible.
Polycentric dance functions according to a similar principle. Consider the case of a dancer who initiates a grounded spiral through the pelvis and bent knees. This downward torque routes energy upward through the spine, displacing the thoracic cavity. To an observer, the chest appears to shoot upward with percussive force, but in fact, it is the rest of the body that has dropped, making the chest a point of suspended reference. This delayed chest articulation can then be rerouted into an extension through the arms, producing a final accent at the hand. In this structure, the initiating action—the grounding of the pelvis and knees—is the equivalent of the hand plunging into water. The chest arrives as a delayed consequence, while the hand delivers a rhythmic punctuation that completes the sequence. All three are temporally staggered, yet choreographically synchronized to converge into a singular expressive event.
This technique of polytemporal self-accompaniment allows the dancer to distribute rhythmic causality across the body. Actions unfold on different timelines but culminate in coordinated arrival. The effect is a choreographic simultaneity that conceals its recursive construction. The dancer appears to generate motion instantaneously, but in fact orchestrates a complex layering of past, present, and anticipated future actions—each with its own rhythmic pathway and anatomical logic.
Polytemporal self-accompaniment is therefore not an aesthetic embellishment—it is the operational core of polycentric dancing within the selfpolyfied system. It populates the body across temporal registers, allowing multiple timelines to inhabit a shared moment. The body becomes a site of layered arrival, where kinetic memory and rhythmic foresight produce composite gestures that speak across temporal difference.
This practice materializes Africana philosophical understandings of time as spiral, accumulative, and recursive. The dancer does not simply move through time—they sculpt it, bend it, and inhabit it across multiple centers. The result is not a disruption of linear temporality, but its complete reconfiguration. The polycentric dancer becomes the site where time folds, overlaps, and reveals its non-linear structure. Each phrase becomes an act of temporal choreography—layered, recursive, and ethically timed.
Corpoprojected Scenography
Corpoprojected Scenography describes the Africana dancing body’s capacity to project entire environments—temporal, spatial, and emotional—through rhythmic motion. It is not about stage design or theatrical backdrop; the body is the scenographic instrument. What we carry in the body, we place into the field. The dancer’s motion does not just move through space—it creates space, textures it, and saturates it with ancestral, urban, or spiritual references that others can enter and feel.
This capacity is rooted in a long-standing practice of inwardly absorbing one’s surroundings—groove, architecture, memory, rhythm, atmosphere—and storing them within the musculature, gravity pathways, and kinetic patterns of the body. The Africana dancing body, in particular, has become a potent vessel for this kind of projection. This is not only due to training or technique, but also because of the dense semiotic load that history, stereotype, and cultural memory have attached to it. These associations—sometimes violently imposed, sometimes reclaimed—have endowed the body with an extraordinary scenographic literacy.
A simple shift in gait can conjure a scene. A dragging, loose, rhythmically clipped walk with shoulders raised—the “chipping” step of Trinidadian Carnival—evokes dense crowds, vibrating streets, and the shared euphoria of Carnival. A lifted chest and extended neck might draw the audience into the expanse of a savannah. A spiraling spine or supple undulation across thoracic vertebrae places us by a river or waterfall, even when no water is in sight. The body does not mime these spaces; it emits them. It has stored them and now lets them leak, pulse, and radiate into the field.
In this sense, rhythm is not only temporal—it is cartographic. It marks location, generates atmosphere, and builds relational space. The dancer’s ability to drop into gravity, to embody weighted timing, to pulse with stored rhythmic reference, becomes a way of populating the performance space with environment. This is not a symbolic act. The space is transformed. The dancer’s presence alters the physical and perceptual field, allowing others to feel themselves located in a specific temporal–spatial narrative without a single set piece or projected visual.
While this phenomenon is not exclusive to Africana bodies, the Africana dancing body has, through generations of ritual, performance, and lived experience, become an expert in it. It is evident in the embodiment of spirit traditions: When one dances Ogun or Erzulie, it is not only the spirit who arrives—it is the entire world they belong to. Iron, forest, blood, metal. Water, perfume, mirrors, silk. The dancer projects the geography, the elements, and the cosmological texture of the spirit’s environment. This kind of projection is cultivated through repetition, but is also made possible through the Africana body’s intimate, historical relationship with rhythm, association, and the technologies of embodiment under pressure.
Corpoprojected Scenography, then, is not simply about memory or performance—it is about world-making. It affirms that the body can carry the architecture of multiple landscapes and release them into shared space. It also challenges dominant notions of scenography that depend on external construction. If the dancer can transform a sidewalk into a savannah, or a crowded street into a sanctuary, then scenography is no longer the background—it is the foregrounded presence of rhythm, gravity, memory, and cultural density traveling through the moving body.
Improvisation as Rhythmic Communication and Cultural Idiom
Improvisation in Africana dance systems is not random movement—it is structured signaling. Within polytemporal kinetofields, each improvisational act functions as a rhythmic utterance—a micro-decision with communicative weight. The dancer navigates timing not for spectacle, but to inscribe rhythm into social space. This routing is neither abstract nor purely aesthetic—it is strategic. It invites recognition, response, and repetition.
This is where Gesto-Rhythmitization operates. Coined in 2024 as part of Anansis Web (my doctoral dissertation), Gesto-Rhythmitization refers to the process by which rhythmic movement becomes gestural language. These gestures are rhythmic propositions, designed for intelligibility across multiple sensory channels—visual, tactile, sonic, etheric. They seek to communicate, to circulate, and to become idiom. The wrist flick, the spiral, the pelvic delay—they do not simply adorn rhythm; they speak it. They contribute to a system in which rhythm is not only felt, but read, cited, and extended.
Africana dance practices are inherently communicative. They generate new language through motion. To gesture rhythmically is to inscribe meaning directly onto the beat. Gesto-Rhythmitization makes the dancer both speaker and scribe. A dancer does not just express feeling—they encode memory, signal identity, confront power, and shape collectivity through curated rhythmic expression.
This is why Africana dance goes viral—not in the sense of digital popularity, but as culturally validated uptake. When a movement enters the communal body, becomes referenced, copied, and embedded in social rhythm—like the electric slide, ndombolo, parlance, or “pon de river pon de bank”—it has achieved idiomatic status. It has become lengua franca, eligible cool. It has entered the rhythmic lexicon.
Improvisation thus functions as cultural memory in motion. It surfaces ancestral logic while proposing new futures. The dancer draws from stored rhythm—what has been brought in and stored through groove, gravity, and gesture—and projects it outward. Not just projecting energy, but projecting intelligible, repeatable, and referential rhythmic language. This is the heartbeat of Africana composition.
Because Gesto-Rhythmitization is tied to rhythm’s linguistic properties—especially in tonal and prosodic cultures—it operates on multiple registers simultaneously. Every rhythmic break, every polyrhythmic layer, is also a semantic offering. In the same way that “phat” reinvents “fat,” or “ovahstand” deepens “understand,” our movements propose alternate grammars. They gesture toward multiple realms—social, ancestral, divine—becoming legible across them.
Improvisation, in this framework, is not the absence of structure. It is the presence of rhythmic choice-making aimed at cultural uptake. Each gesture is a probability node: Will this spread? Will this become a reference? Is this eligible for repetition? This is rhythmic authorship, and its currency is intelligibility, resonance, and communal retention.
Gesto-Rhythmitization formalizes this process. It names the communicative ambition within the gesture. It explains why we do not just dance—we signify. Why our motion creates style, and our style becomes speech. Why Africana dance, when it truly lands, reorganizes time, language, and community through the rhythmic intelligence of the moving body.
Cascading Time: The Fractal Ecology of Re-Entry
Africana kinetic traditions operate within a logic of layered continuance. Motion proceeds through return, but the return is never singular. Re-entry is a method of dimensional thickening—a compositional device that permits a gesture to evolve without departing from its core. Even when a movement appears to resolve, it leaves behind a residue: energetic, rhythmic, spatial.
Each entry into the field revisits what was previously laid down, while simultaneously altering its composition. This recursive engagement builds a temporal architecture where prior gestures remain accessible as kinetic scaffolding. Re-entry activates that scaffolding, allowing the body to press into already-charged space and reshape it from within.
This is how groove is constructed. Groove is not built through strict repetition, but through layered referentiality. Each iteration compacts and thickens the rhythmic infrastructure, expanding the options for both departure and return. The groove remains legible through kinetic implication—encoded in the space between articulations, in the delay, and in the reappearance.
Re-entry allows micro-variations to gain weight. The dancer builds resonance by returning differently each time—altering entry points, shifting emphasis, stretching intervals. Each return strikes the rhythm again, like hammer to iron. What seems like repetition is, in fact, a forging. The pressure of return does not simply echo—it transforms. As with iron in the forge, each impact alters the internal structure. The molecular composition changes, not just the shape. Rhythm becomes memory under pressure. Motion becomes knowledge through insistence.
Over time, this accumulates into a dense field of rhythmic propositions, each suspended in relation to the ones before. The field holds readiness. It invites action. It widens what is possible. By re-entering, by modulating, by insisting—by returning—we clarify the difference between gesture and form, between citation and contribution. We make visible what is chosen. We iterate mastery. We declare relation.
“Nothing can ever return, it can only start again” Dr. Harold Charles-Harris (Presto’s grandfather)
In cypher and ceremonial contexts, this readiness becomes communal. One dancer’s recursive phrasing establishes a referential pulse that another might intercept, refract, or extend. Bodies move within a shared temporal infrastructure, each carrying distinct rhythmic identities but held together through re-entry logics. This is not improvisation. It is rhythmically structured recursion—anchored in shared timing systems and ancestral return.
Temporal Sovereignty and Groove Ethics
The polytemporal kinetofield is not just a technical or aesthetic condition—it is a political one. In a world that attempts to dictate the speed of labor, the pace of healing, the rhythm of recognition, the dancer in a polytemporal groove field asserts temporal sovereignty. They claim the right to pause, to delay, to extend, to break pattern, to enter a future that is not prescribed but generated through motion.
This is where groove becomes ethical. To groove is not just to keep time—it is to create time that others can enter. Groove is shared. Groove is offered. Groove is temporal care. The dancer’s polytemporal activity is not self-enclosed—it extends a rhythmic bridge into possible futures. This is the political labor of corpoprojected scenography: to make time and space felt, alive, and available to others.
Recursive Kinetics as Temporal Philosophy
To selfpolyfy within a polytemporal kinetofield is to choreograph through time, not on top of it. It is to move with the recursive logics of fractal repetition, groove-sharing, re-entry, and corpoprojected resonance. In this structure, choreography is not scripted form—it is time-ecology. The dancer becomes a temporal architect, a groove-carrier, and a scenographic agent.
And in doing so, the dancer affirms: time is not linear. It is relational. It is recursive. It is made, not given.
Conclusion: Choreographing from Within—Selfpolyfication as Diasporic Infrastructure and Compositional Offering
This work marks a compositional threshold. Selfpolyfication has been advanced as more than methodology, more than system—it is an organizing principle through which diasporic presence, motion, memory, and futurity find structure. It is a framework born from within the rhythmic technologies of our traditions, now articulated for the practitioner, the choreographer, the scholar—for those who move, and those who make meaning from that movement.
Each concept offered across these pages is a tool, a signal, a scaffold. Together, they comprise a kinetic infrastructure capable of holding the complexity of diasporic embodiment without flattening it. Polytemporal kinetofields, corpoprojected scenography, rhythmic foresight, probability-based composition, groove as structuring code, and recursive entry into motion—these are not metaphors or borrowed analytics. They are grounded, articulated, and built from the inside of practice, from the embodied knowledge systems we have inherited, developed, and shared.
Selfpolyfication affirms that the capacity to operate across temporalities, across centers, across compositional fields, has always existed in our movement. This work offers a structure for how we might speak of it, teach it, write it, and transmit it forward. It is an attempt to give architectural clarity to what many already know—to give form to a feeling, structure to a memory, language to a logic that has lived in the body.
This is a theory made in rhythm. It is a vocabulary designed not for abstraction, but for circulation—for uptake by those who live within groove fields, who compose through tension and return, who structure with the breath and the bassline. The writing here does not claim to finalize or contain the knowledge—it contributes to its visibility. It builds a container capacious enough for pressure, recursion, improvisation, inheritance, and intention to coexist.
The offering is manifold: a choreographic system rooted in ancestral technologies; a method for composing without erasure; a model for how we might speak of our dancing and know that it speaks back. It is a translational labor—taking what has long been practiced, passed through callouses, ceremonies, and crowded rooms, and giving it new scaffolding for transmission. This scaffolding is built not from outside theory but from diasporic choreoepistemology—a field grounded in the conviction that movement produces knowledge, that rhythm encodes memory, and that the body itself is a world-making force.
The future of this work is already underway. It lives in new pedagogies, in choreographies not yet written, in conversations held in studios, classrooms, and cyphers across the globe. It will travel through staged productions, intensives, writings, rituals, and shared dances. It is a live system, and its next iterations will emerge through the ways it is taught, referenced, adapted, and extended by those in dialogue with it.
For those who have recognized their own movement logics in these pages—for those who found words that named what you already knew—I wrote this with you in mind. This is one contribution to a larger collective labor: the affirmation of diasporic choreographic intelligence as rigorous, expansive, and foundational. The journey toward writing us into existence—on the page, in the studio, across our own epistemic ground—is ongoing.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for referencing.
Thank you for moving with me.
Thank you for letting me know what resonated.
This is the beginning of the next rhythm.
Yours in Rhythm,
Thomas Talawa Presto
Figure 1: Photo Credit: Tabanka Dance Ensemble.
Figure 2: Photo Credit: Tabanka Dance Ensemble.
Figure 3: Photo Credit: Tabanka Dance Ensemble.
Figure 4: Photo Credit: Tabanka Dance Ensemble.
Figure 5: Photo Credit: Tabanka Dance Ensemble.
Figure 6: Photo Credit: Tabanka Dance Ensemble.
Bibliography
Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
McFerrin, Bobby, performer. Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus. World Science Festival, 2009. https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/notes-neurons/.