By Azsanée Truss, Podcast Producer

Groovin’ Griot is a podcast exploring how we use dance to tell stories throughout the African Diaspora. It is produced and edited by my co-host, OreOluwa Badaki (Ore), and I with the support of the Teachers College Digital Futures Institute (DFI). Here, I reflect on the process of creating this podcast. 

About the Podcast

The term “griot” comes from the West African tradition of oral and embodied storytelling. Griots are traveling poets, musicians, genealogists, and historians who preserve and tell stories via a variety of modalities. On Groovin’ Griot, we center the West African Diaspora, honoring the legacy of the griot by talking to the storytellers in our communities who help us understand the role of dance in remembering and reimagining the lessons embedded in these stories.

The Inception of Groovin’ Griot

Groovin’ Griot is deeply rooted in the work Ore and I do as researchers. Ore is currently a Research Scholar at DFI and is an alum of the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at the University of Pennsylvania. Bridging research in critical literacy studies, multimodal scholarship, and environmental justice, she examines how power moves through bodies and spaces within food and land systems. I am a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a Teachers College alum. I study the role of multimodal forms in structuring liberatory knowledge production processes. 

Ore and I met in 2020, during my first year as a doctoral student at Annenberg and her fourth year as a doctoral student in GSE. Ore was Co-Director of the Collective for the Advancement of Multimodal Research Arts, or CAMRA, alongside Jasmine Blanks-Jones.The three of us had a few Zoom meetings and realized we were interested in chronicling the range of exciting multimodal projects happening in and around the CAMRA. As a result, I started The CAMRA Archives podcast with Ore and Jasmine’s support. The first season of The CAMRA Archives podcast focused on movement and embodiment as methodology and pedagogy in Black women’s institutional/organizational leadership, research, and personal practices — a project that would turn out to be an early seedling of the Groovin’ Griot podcast. 

At MASCLab’s 2023 MediaFest, Ore presented a project titled Seed and Sound (see video below), an interactive performance exhibit consisting of a short dance film, a painted footpath, and a collaborative storytelling wall. The choreography was inspired by West African neotraditional dances related to food and agriculture, bringing together the notion of “diaspore” in botany and the notion of “Diaspora” in cultural studies. At the same MediaFest, I presented Grounding, a series of collages that are meditation on dances, rituals, and movement practices throughout the African diaspora. The project seeks to visually understand patterns in dances/rituals and the cultures which surround them across the African diaspora, arguing for a more place-based, cultural, bodily engagement with the origins of these movements and cultures through collage. On the train ride back to Philadelphia from MediaFest in NYC, Ore proposed that we work on a podcast that wove together the threads of our ongoing, interrelated work. She cleverly suggested we title the podcast Groovin’ Griot. 

The Production Process

The production process began with several meetings creating the structure of the podcast, developing a budget, picking our guests, creating a timeline, choosing music, and creating an RSS feed, reaching out to guests, scheduling interviews, developing interview questions, and recording conversations with our guests. Once our interviews were complete, we set out to develop paper edits, highlighting the most compelling parts of each interview and writing the narration that allowed us to shape and story each episode. As we wrote and recorded the narration, we tried to develop a conversational tone which we jokingly refer to as “convo-narration.” These recording sessions were some of my favorite parts of this process, and there are plenty of bloopers to show for the fun we had trying to perfect our “convo-narrational” style. 

During this time, Ore and I also brainstormed ways to incorporate our personal movement practices into the podcast. We landed on creating “movement breaks.” We took a couple of dance classes together, in addition to recording classes and performances we engaged in separately, reflecting on how we felt before and afterward. The movement practices we explored included house dance, Lamban, and Bantaba, among others. This helped us to get into our bodies and remember the ethos of our podcast, and hopefully encouraged our listeners to get up and move too. 

As much as we’d like to pretend production ended and we neatly edited the episodes afterward, much of the editing took place amidst production. We went through rounds of feedback, sometimes re-recording narration and rearranging our thoughts in the process. While this approach was often messy, it allowed us to create a more cohesive story arc throughout the entire season and nimbly work through production kinks in real time. 

As a result of this process, the first season of Groovin’ Griot (2024) consists of six episodes:

1. Dance as “Reparative Art” with Dr. Jasmine Blanks-Jones
2. Unbounding the Body with Dr. Deborah Thomas
3. Histories of African Dance Systems with Dr. Ofosuwa Abiola 
4. Dancing the Diasporas with Dr. Lela Aisha Jonews 
5. Improvisation as Tradition and Technology with Dr. S. Ama Wray
6. Groovin’ Griot Season 1 Finale 

All of our episodes can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else podcasts can be found. You can also follow us on Instagram and learn more about each episode on our Transistor feed. You can also check out the digital version of our zine, which visually tells our story. 

Closing Thoughts 

Personally, working on Groovin’ Griot has deepened my commitment to multimodal scholarship. I came to new understandings and connected with Ore and our guests in ways that traditional (written) scholarship does not typically afford. 

Further, sharing this podcast with my community—particularly my non-academic community—has been particularly enriching. Sharing the podcast with other dancers has sparked new and interesting conversations, allowing me to better understand what and how we “know” with our bodies. Friends and family have also listened in, gaining a glimpse into one aspect of my academic work. 

Going forward, we hope to produce future seasons of Groovin’ Griot focused on themes such as spirituality, foodways, and political movement(s). In the meantime, we are focused on sharing this first season with a wider audience—so, spread the word and share Groovin’ Griot with a friend!