Evolve Diaspora

EVOLVE Diaspora was birthed out of a conversation between two friends Kelly S. White and Winston Benons Jr..   Kelly S. White is a professional dance educator, scholar, performer and choreographer.  She created EVOLVE Diaspora as a personal mission to help further her own professional development.

In January 2017 EVOLVE launched announcing the inaugural workshop called EVOLVE Intimate Moments with the Masters. Over a weekend in February 2017, ten dance professionals gathered together in a studio in Brooklyn, NY to train under a Master Teacher in Haitian Folkloric Dance and Music. The participants were able to submerge themselves in intense dance training, music, history and the lore of Haitian Dance. With that humble beginning, Evolve Diaspora began to grow and branch out with their programming.

EVOLVE Diaspora created EVOLVE Explorations, a cultural immersion trip where participants travel to various locations in the African Diaspora to study dance and culture. The first trip was to Havana, Cuba in July of 2017. With the success of the first trip EVOLVE added Matanzas to its 2018 trip and has also expanded to include New Orleans, LA as part of its trip offerings.

The next program that was added to EVOLVE’s roster was EVOLVE Communities. With the help of the Brooklyn Arts Council Evolve Communities made it’s debut in July of 2018, with a free workshop series designed for families to experience and learn about the various dances of the African Diaspora. The goal was to make quality dance training accessible to everyone and help increase family bonding time.

Kelly took a major leap of faith and shifted from having informal conversations about her need for enrichment to developing and creating programming for a population of movers who had the same thirst for knowledge as her.