J-Sun/Jason Noer (MA/PhD)

J-Sun is a long-term practitioner of several street dance forms which he teaches, choreographs, theorizes, and performs. He believes in being accountable to community, challenging tradition, and artistic collaboration as a key element of social change. He is the Artistic Director for the Mixtape series at the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts. J-Sun is a Ph.D. student in the Theater Arts and Dance Department at the University of Minnesota, as well as a disciplinary head of the new Hip Hop Dance track. His current choreographic and academic work focuses on using a break(danc)ing to investigate issues of power, identity, and community with a historiographical and intersectional lens. He recently published his first book, Music, Moves, and Mind-Sets: Theorizing Hip Hop History and Pedagogy Through Break(danc)ing. He has contributed several chapters to a new book, The Future of Music: Towards a Computational Musical Theory of Everything, to be published by Springer in Fall 2019. His upcoming commissioned work, Grounded Theory, will be performed in the 2020 Spring Concert by the dance majors in the UMN Dance Program.