Tag: UNC Charlotte

Ashley Tate has danced and choreographed for most of her life.

And the further she has gone with the art form, the more she has turned her focus toward amplifying voices of the past and present. Tate, an assistant professor of dance at UNC Charlotte, specializes in African diaspora movement, especially hip-hop and jazz dance, and how these forms connect to identity and social change.

Those topics are front and center this year across several major creative projects she’s leading — including an inaugural hip-hop symposium at the university in October that will explore hip-hop as a cultural phenomenon.

Tate recently spoke with The Charlotte Observer about the inspiration behind the event, her experience growing up immersed in a family of artists and how her insatiable curiosity led her to see dance as a tool to understand and preserve history.

The power of hip-hop

Charlotte has a vibrant hip-hop culture, Tate said, and that’s something she wants to highlight through the symposium being held on the university’s main and uptown campuses from Oct. 17-19.

To the Beat Y’all: A Hip Hop Symposium features live performances, scholarly presentations, community conversations and workshops. That includes research presentations on hip-hop, identity and activism, interactive workshops in education and creative practice, and a freestyle dance battle.

The conference is not just for academics or dancers. Tate said it’s for anyone who is curious about the origins and role of hip-hop over time and how it continues to be a catalyst for social change, empowerment and identity.

“I just don’t think a lot of people know how powerful hip-hop is,” Tate said. “Hip-hop is … kind of interwoven in our pop culture now. It’s not something you can pick up and put down or consume and throw away.”

Its influence stretches across politics, music and art. Tate often hears from students after completing one of her hip-hop-based classes that they’re able to “come out of their shell more,” speak out more in other courses and life situations, and generally feel more confident.

Tate hopes the symposium will spur conversation about the many ways hip-hop can affect individuals and communities.

She’s bringing together a variety of experts, including national figures like keynote speaker Manny Faces. He’s an award-winning journalist, author, public speaker and DJ.

His recent book, “Hip Hop Can Save America!” looks at the ways key elements of hip-hop — such as innovation, collaboration and resilience — have influenced fields like education, healthcare, technology and community building.

Other experts will focus on topics like using hip-hop to promote social-emotional learning in classrooms, harnessing hip-hop’s emphasis on play through experimentation and bold expression, teaching dance techniques and using hip-hop for community building.

The conference will bring together “hip-hop scholars, practitioners and artists that are working in different sectors,” Tate said. “All of their voices are important, and they all contribute to uplifting hip-hop.”

In particular, work by North Carolina dancers, spoken word artists and visual artists will be featured.

Students and alumni will take part in the symposium, too. They will perform original works, choreographed by Tate, at a Saturday night concert as well as share research and lead some workshops. Tate also expects students to be well-represented at the dance battle.

The documentary film “Carolina Noise,” by Charlotte-based artist and audio engineer Nigel Malone (also known as NXGXL) will be screened during the weekend. It features conversations with influential North Carolina artists exploring how their stories and art have helped shape culture.

Tate moved to Charlotte three years ago from her native St. Louis to join the university’s faculty. She said learning more about the region’s history and connecting with local practitioners is another reason she’s excited about the conference.

Growing up immersed in the arts

Tate has a long resume of accomplishments as a dancer, choreographer and educator, from concert halls to community building efforts like co-founding Dance the Vote, a nonpartisan voting initiative in St. Louis.

Like many kids, she started with classes in ballet and tap, following in her older sister’s footsteps. But at home she was getting a different kind of arts education.

“I always say that I’ve been training in these diasporic styles, like jazz and hip-hop, just culturally in my family… pretty much my whole life.”

Tate said her mother, who died about a year ago, was “a jazz dancer all the way” and influenced much of her work. They shared a passion for dance.

And they always sought the why behind things: “Why is this music the way it is and how does the dance relate to this?” Tate said. “And why do I feel a certain type of way when I’m doing this type of dance?”

She continues to pursue these questions in her research.

Tate’s dad worked as a freelance DJ in the 1980s and early 1990s, and introduced her to funk and early hip-hop artists during that time through his extensive record collection.

She remembers exploring the crates full of records he would lug to gigs.

“I was a nosy little kid, too…” Tate said. “Back then the album covers were just as vibrant and just as important, and the liner notes were just as important as the music itself (because) they told us history. There was (an) archive there.”

She inherited that collection and shares those memories now in her classes to illustrate where music stood at the time it came out.

As a child, Tate didn’t understand how fresh and different this style was, she said. Later, she noticed how these early experiences stuck with her.

These experiences affected her in other significant ways, too.

For example, by occasionally accompanying her dad on gigs, Tate learned how to get in front of people and freestyle dance. She’s never had a fear of dancing without choreography, she said, but it’s a skill that’s challenging for many of her students.

“I love choreography,” Tate said. “But at the heart of hip-hop is this idea of freestyle improvisation and thinking on your feet and self-affirmation through that… And so I’m realizing how much that influenced my entire dance career.”

Using dance to explore the past

What started as a personal quest to understand her own experiences led Tate to explore other communities and historic moments via dance.

She recently received a North Carolina Choreographic Fellowship from Trillium Arts for next June. The organization, located on a rural campus in the Blue Ridge Mountains, provides artists with time, space and funding to pursue new works.

Tate and four professional dancers will spend two weeks there working on a dance piece incorporating multiple styles, including contemporary ballet, modern and diaspora movement. It focuses on the environmental justice work of activist Hazel Johnson.

Johnson is known as the “Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement.” She began advocating for her public housing project community on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s, after learning nearby toxic waste was causing high rates of cancer and serious respiratory illnesses among children.

“I think the natural setting of being in the mountains doing this work will serve as a contrast and a catalyst for me,” Tate said. “Everybody deserves a place where they can breathe and a place to be, and (where) they can see this amazing nature.”

That’s something she didn’t have access to during her first iteration of “Hazel,” which she presented during the pandemic, while living in the North City of St. Louis. It’s an area she loves but that lacks green space or open walking areas.

Safety protocols also restricted the movement she could use in the piece, including any partnered dancing. Back then, she conducted all of her research through books and articles.

This time, Tate will visit Chicago to do site research next April and May. She plans to gather oral histories from people who knew Johnson and can talk about what it was like living in Chicago at that time. She’ll use that research to guide her choreography.

“I’ve done quite a few projects in the last few years that are focused on specific stories and choreographing these narratives of people and/or communities that otherwise don’t have any archive,” Tate said.

She’s also interested in what’s different when you bring to life a story through music and dance rather than on paper. “What do these different mediums activate and what do they do for the audiences in these different mediums?”

Civil rights movement through jazz

Next April, Tate also will bring a civil rights focused arts initiative called the No Tears Project to Charlotte. She first joined the jazz group in 2022 when the program came to St. Louis. The program usually visits cities with a prominent civil rights history.

It was created in 2017 in response to the story of the Little Rock Nine, the group of African-American students who in 1957 were the first to integrate Little Rock Central High School in the face of considerable and violent opposition.

“I love this group,” Tate said. “I think that the work they do is powerful…. You’re learning about civil rights history. You’re responding to civil rights history through jazz music and dance, so I wanted to bring it to Charlotte.”

Students will be involved in the interdisciplinary project, and she hopes to work with UNC Charlotte’s music department to commission one or two students to compose a new work about Charlotte.

But Tate knows that like her other initiatives, “No Tears Project” will involve storytelling via the African diaspora, educating the community about social change and self-identity and preserving the past through embodied history.

Want to go?

To the Beat Y’all: A Hip Hop Symposium, Oct. 17-19, UNC Charlotte

Registration and ticket info at tinyurl.com/tothebeatyallsymposium

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This story was originally published October 7, 2025 at 6:06 AM.