Skip to main content
The University of Iowa
University of Iowa

Office of Community Engagement

Site Main Navigation

  • University Impact
    • Understanding Engagement
    • Stories of Impact
    • Annual Report
    • Newsletter Archive
    • MyCounty Map
      • Community Impact Map
  • Engaged Teaching & Learning
    • Learn More
    • Community Engaged Courses (CEC)
      • Faculty
      • Students
    • Resources
    • Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities
  • Engaged Research & Scholarship
    • Learn More
    • Graduate Engagement Corps (GEC)
      • Grant Awards
    • Publishing and Conferences
  • Engagement and the Arts
    • Learn More
    • Community Engaged Art
    • Arts Share
      • Home
      • About
      • Programs
      • News & Events
    • Grant Wood Art Colony
      • 2022/23 Grant Wood Fellowship Program Application
    • Video Archive
  • Workshop Series
  • Get Involved
  • Who We Are
    • Our Office
    • Our Staff
    • COVID-19 Resources
Homepage Banner

Home

We Are Hiring!

Join our team and help create new opportunities for community engagement to enhance student learning, enrich engaged research, and impact communities across Iowa and beyond.

Learn More

TEST

Engineering Students

The Office of Community Engagement Supports the University of Iowa's Mission ⇢ 

Student and professor working on a sculpture.

By Facilitating Community-Engaged Learning and Research Opportunities ⇢ 

A group of GEC members meeting at Public Space One

Training in the Field and Professional Development ⇢ 

Rachel Young paints furniture with students

That Connect Students and Faculty with Community Partners ⇢ 

Clinton Downtown Mural

And the Arts in Local Communities ⇢ 

Students on a bus to Dubuque

To Help Hawkeyes Make an Impact Across Iowa and Beyond  

Annual Report Banner Image
Students work on a laptop together

Understanding Community Engagement

Students learning sign language

What is Community-Engaged Learning?

A woman presents to colleagues.

What is Community-Engaged Research?

Whitman Plastic City Display

Community Engagement and the Arts

Engineering Students

Resources for Community-Engaged Researchers

Students help sort household items at a local nonprofit

Stories of University Impact Across Iowa and Beyond

Faculty gather at a training seminar

Community Engaged Course (CEC) Information for Instructors and Students

Annual Report Banner Image
The University of Iowa is a diverse, destination university where students, faculty, and staff work with community partners across the state of Iowa and beyond every day to make a measurable, enduring, and meaningful difference through community engagement.
Map Banner 2

Featured Impact Story

Kieron Sargeant Banner

Monday, July 18, 2022

Grant Wood Art Colony fellow Kieron Sargeant challenges students to think different while bringing rich African Caribbean dance traditions to the University of Iowa campus and community partners through community-engaged teaching and research

 

A Trinidadian-born interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, dancer, and dance researcher emerging from the African-Caribbean tradition, Kieron Sargeant received an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Florida State University and an MA in Community Dance Practice from Ohio University.

Kieron Sargeant Dance pic

In 2020 Sargeant founded and launched the Kieron Sargeant Dance and Dance Education Foundation of Trinidad and Tobago, a new platform for artists and dancers to 'nurture their creativity, inspire their environments, and empower themselves and the future of the arts industry' in Trinidad and Tobago.

In 2022, Sargeant won the competitive process to join the Grant Wood Art Colony (GWAC) fellowship. This in-residence program allowed him to further his research while teaching University of Iowa students and impacting campus and community partners by sharing his work in African dance traditions.

The GWAC fellowship provides a creative home for the next generation of artists at the University of Iowa while continuing Grant Wood's creative advocacy in the School of Art & Art History and the Division of Performing Arts through artist residencies, teaching fellowships, symposia, and community programs.

Sargeant learned about the GWAC fellowship from the University of Iowa Department of Dance chair, Dr. Rebekah Kowal, when he first arrived at the University of Iowa as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Contemporary Forms and African Diaspora.

"Dr. Kowal was the one who encouraged me to apply for the position," Sargeant said. "I felt honored to be encouraged and supported by her."

Sargeant was attracted to the fellowship position as it aligned with his artistic, teaching, and research goals.

"The Grant Wood Art Colony moves artmaking forward by advocating for the art," Sargeant said. "I seek to do the same thing inside my tradition."

INSPIRING INSIGHT AND CHANGE THROUGH DANCE

The GWAC Interdisciplinary Performance – Dance fellowship allowed Sargeant to continue to explore his research while interacting with the community to enhance understanding and engage University of Iowa students with new ways of interpreting the art form and themselves.

"I will have more time to do my research and work on developing new aspects of my artistic practice, which will lead to new collaborations, and audiences for my work," Sargeant said. "I am particularly interested in developing courses that fit the University's vision for diversity, equity, and inclusion."

As a Dance artist from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Sargeant's focused his teaching on African Caribbean and African Diasporic dance practices and Spiritual and Ritual Practices.

Kieron Sargeant Performance Pic

"I firmly believe in the value of personalized discovery as a vital tool for student learning and inquiry," Sargeant said. "My approach to teaching is to foster an embodied understanding of Caribbean and African Diasporic culture and identity, which helps students recognize how their bodies and personal histories play a role in the larger discourse of the Caribbean and African Diasporic culture."  

Through his lessons, Sargeant constantly challenged students to delve into their 'personal body histories,' asking what it meant for the body to 'exist in this space, time, day, and age' and 'what are the more significant contextual effects of life' that impact the how and why of their movement or behavior.

"I believe in making the material relevant to students' lived experiences, so they possess a better ability to make a connection and investigate the relationship between dance practices and the historical context from which those practices emerge," Sargeant said.

The University of Iowa is one of the few academic institutions in the United States that offers Brazilian dance and Afro Caribbean and African diasporic dance.

"I appreciate that the Dance Department and the University at large try to expose students to the global rather than just the provincial," Sargeant said. "They try to open up space for students and faculty to engage with difference… and I am happy to be a catalyst for this new direction."

CHALLENGING BARRIERS THROUGH DECADES OF RESEARCH

Over the past 20 years, Sargeant has been documenting, assessing, and analyzing dance traditions of the Caribbean to establish a canon of dance teachings and workshops, informed by his research, to popularize the ancestral survival of movement traditions between the Circum-Caribbean and Western Africa.

Sargeant's research, Embodied Ethnographies as a Diasporic Methodological Practices: Tracing Africanist rituals from Sacred Space to the Commercial Stage, focused on the emerging field of African Caribbean and African Diaspora dance practices. He explores regenerative and deconstructionist approaches to engaging with African Traditional Trinidadian Dances for the commercial and contemporary dance world.

"This research seeks to challenge the dichotomy between commercial and ritual dance through the contemporary black and brown body by questioning how legacy and ancestral knowledge are transmitted," Sargeant said.

Sargeant's research questioned 'patriarchal capitalist colonial involvement in displacing sacred rituals for monetary gain.'

"My work asks, how can black and brown dancing bodies mark the arrivals and departures of traditional African diasporic dance aesthetics as they function as containers or foils for embodied knowledge disseminated on the commercial stage through sacred displacement," Sargeant said.

Sargeant's research sought to locate itself along the continuum of traditional African practices in the contemporary world by examining the "The Limbo Dance," as practiced in Trinidad & Tobago and migrated to other spaces and practices.

Rather than imagining ritual and commercial dance as being opposed, Sargeant - through embodied ethnographic practices - illustrated how enacting The Limbo Dance of Trinidad and Tobago and others on both ritual and commercial dance stages functioned as parts of the same continuum of performance.

"This research demonstrates how Limbo Dance functions as a genealogical archive traced back through performances in sacred dance for efficacy and entertainment," Sargeant said.

Firstly, The Limbo Dance makes visible an embodied knowing, which in part is learning about one traditional dance and or legacy, its values, origins, history, and how to mobilize that knowledge through body-to-body transmission.

Secondly, the recent displaced enactment of The Limbo Dance recreates and preserves the link with ancestors, or those who have created the dances, with those who dance in their footsteps, creating living legacies made in the present.

Thirdly, The Limbo Dance, in practice, locates an aesthetic reference, a frame for reading and interpreting not only the form but its ritualistic representation, meanings, and symbols.

Through the GWAC fellowship, Sargeant continued to look for opportunities to reach Iowa communities through his art.

"The goals between the Grant Wood Art Colony and me are best illustrated by my deep desire to move artmaking forward and to have it open to the community," Sargeant said. "I hope to show my work at the African American History Museum and spaces on and off campus."

MORE STORIES OF IMPACT
Annual Report Banner Image

Be the first to know about engagement opportunities, community events, and more!

The University of Iowa
University of Iowa 175th Anniversary

Office of Community Engagement

Iowa City, Iowa 52242

ui-engagement@uiowa.edu

Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • TikTok
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Admin Login

  • © 2022 The University of Iowa
  • Privacy Notice
  • Nondiscrimination Statement
  • Accessibility
  • UI Indigenous Land Acknowledgement