Year of Graduation
2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MFA: Dance
Directing Professor
Jeffery N. Bullock
Abstract
This thesis investigates how mythopoeic world-building praxis creates brave space through Nova the Phat, a hybrid and supersyncretic performance entity shaped by Blackness, Caribbean inheritance, ballroom, ritual, fantasy, dance, comedy, and fabulousness. The project asks how imagination, often dismissed as escape, can instead function as an embodied method for rehearsing agency, relation, and courage. Rather than a character alone, Nova functions as a disidentificatory engine: a creative apparatus that remixes dominant expectations of performance, pedagogy, visibility, and belonging. Its supersyncretic form refuses cultural purity, drawing power from layered Black, Caribbean, queer, and communal histories rather than a single stable origin. Through studio-based movement research, improvisation, script development, workshop facilitation, reflective writing, and performance experimentation, the project develops Nova the Phat’s Playroom of Bravery as a living archive and activation site. Games, scores, movement prompts, humor, ritual, and collective witnessing invite participants to unsettle habitual orientations and practice alternative ways of being together. Drawing on critical fabulation, the thesis engages gaps within dance history, Black performance, queer memory, and embodied knowledge, treating ephemeral experience as evidence. It argues that collective witnessing can generate a temporary counterpublic that interrupts extractive modes of spectatorship and makes room for recognition, relation, and agency. Ultimately, brave space is framed not as a sentimental ideal but as a purposefully hosted, score-based encounter structured through consent, shared permission, risk, care, and mutual accountability.
Recommended Citation
Isaac, William N., "Nova the Phat: Brave Space as Mythopoeic World-Building Praxis" (2026). Dance (MFA) Theses, Hollins University. 58.
https://digitalcommons.hollins.edu/dancetheses/58
Performance Access Statement
If you wish to see the creative piece or performance that accompanied this thesis, please complete the Request Form, and you should receive a response from the Dance Department within two weeks.