Overview
A place for dance to be remembered, studied, and understood.
Moving Grounds is a Nigerian independent publication, archive, and research platform designed to document, organise, publish, preserve, and make accessible knowledge about dance practice in Nigeria and across the African continent and the diaspora.
At its core, Moving Grounds is being developed as a living knowledge ecosystem where dance can be investigated as a social, political, economic, historical, cultural, and intellectual force, combining digital publishing, archival preservation, research tools, and emerging technologies.
Our Perspective
Dance is a way of knowing.
We believe dance is more than performance. It is a way of knowing, remembering, communicating, and making sense of the world. Across Africa, dance is one of the most visible and continuously evolving cultural practices. Yet much of this knowledge remains fragmented, inaccessible, or absent from the archives that shape how culture is understood. Moving Grounds exists to bring these fragments into conversation, to make sense of it.
Moving Grounds approaches dance from the perspective that what happens in the body is also part of our cultural record. We are interested in the movement itself, but also in the histories, people, systems, economies, politics, technologies, and communities that give movement meaning. Creating space for African dance to be understood on its own terms while remaining open to the many perspectives, contradictions, and possibilities that surround it.
Mission & Vision
An enduring space for dance as knowledge.
We exist to create an enduring space for documenting, examining, connecting, and amplifying the many ways dance creates knowledge and preserves memory. Through rigorous research, critical writing, creative inquiry, documentation, and archival practice, we seek to build a more inclusive understanding of bodies in motion across generations, geographies, and communities.
Our vision is to build the most comprehensive, accessible, and living knowledge ecosystem for African dance practice in the world.
Our Values
What we hold to.
Access
Knowledge about dance should not be restricted by geography, institution, or privilege.
Documentation
We believe documentation is a cultural practice and a responsibility to the future.
Critical Inquiry
We ask questions, challenge assumptions, and make room for complexity.
African Agency
African dance histories should be interpreted with African practitioners, researchers, communities, and contexts at the centre.
Intergenerational Knowledge
We value the knowledge carried between generations, whether formally recorded or embodied through practice.
Equity & Inclusion
We believe African dance spaces, histories, and conversations should make room for diverse bodies, identities, genders, abilities, backgrounds, and lived experiences.
Plurality
There is no single African dance story. We make room for different bodies, histories, traditions, aesthetics, regions, and perspectives.
Care
We approach bodies, memories, histories, and communities with attention and responsibility.
Openness
Moving Grounds is committed to making knowledge discoverable, shareable, and useful.
Our Editorial Approach
Practice and knowledge, held together.
Moving Grounds approaches dance as both practice and knowledge. We are interested in the performance, but also in what surrounds it: the histories that produced it, the bodies that carry it, the systems that support or restrict it, the people who document it, and the ideas that emerge from it.
Our editorial work moves between scholarship and lived experience, archive and contemporary practice, criticism and documentation. We welcome rigorous research without making knowledge inaccessible, and we value the essay, the interview, the photograph, the oral history, the field note, the film, the document, and the archive as different ways of thinking.
What We Publish
Seven themes, many forms of writing.
Moving Grounds publishes work that documents, questions, interprets, and expands the ways dance is understood across Africa, essays, criticism, interviews, research, field notes, photography, film, oral histories, archival materials, reviews, and documentation of performances, festivals, workshops, residencies, and other spaces where dance is created and shared.
The Foundation
Grown from a wider commitment.
Moving Grounds grows from a wider commitment to strengthening the cultural infrastructure around dance in Africa. It is developed by Beghast Dance & Creative Art Foundation, an organisation working across dance, film, cultural documentation, research, and creative practice with the aim of advancing dance.
Moving Grounds extends this work into the realm of knowledge production. Creating systems through which the histories and contemporary realities of dance can be documented, connected, and carried forward.
Our Leadership
Faith Okoh, Founder & CEO
Faith founded Moving Grounds to create access to dance knowledge, contemporary practice, and histories, to better strengthen the transmission system across generations.
Moving Grounds is built by artists, researchers, writers, archivists, filmmakers, photographers, cultural workers, and contributors working across disciplines and geographies.
