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Black Public Media’s AfroPoP Digital Shorts monthly series celebrates Pride Month with the film Hands Performance. The film is the brainchild of Oakland director Rashaad Newsome, an artist, and a vogue scholar. They created an AI named Being the Digital Griot which is a non-binary robot that travels through space. A team of Black Queer ASL interpreters, various vogue fem performers, flex dancers, and motion capture technologists, worked with Newsome to translate his poetry into a motion dataset representing the uniqueness of Black Queer sign language. Newsome debuted the griot in their  Assembly exhibition. Being is the star of Hands and the film continues Newsome’s cartography of Black popular culture. The fluid movements are based on a style of the dance called vogue fem and they are delivered with a fierceness to assert Black Queer lives that are always fighting erasure. Hands Performance is available for viewing on Black Public Media’s YouTube channel. 

AfroPoP documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters has won a 2024 Peabody Award. The Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz documentary is about the dance Bill T. Jones created during the A.I.D.S. crisis when members of his dance company and his partner Arnie Zane died of the illness in the ’80s. The film opened season 15 of the documentary series AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange co-produced by Black Public Media and WORLD. The film focuses on LeBlanc’s dance studio at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and viewers see her students working to learn Jones’ D-Man in the Waters ballet. Jones created the dance in 1989  and named it after Demian Acquavella, who was a star dancer of the Bill T. Jones Arnie Zane Company. 

“We are profoundly honored to have our work recognized by this award that speaks to excellence in storytelling, and we sincerely thank everyone involved with us in funding, making, and distributing Can You Bring It…,” said LeBlanc and Hurwitz.

The filmmakers will receive the accolade at the 84th Annual Peabody Awards on Sunday, June 9, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Acknowledging the award the critically acclaimed documentary will stream for free on the BPM website, WORLDchannel.org, and YouTube through July 9, 2024.