From 1982 to 1984, Adrian Piper staged Funk Lessons, collaborative performances/lectures in which she taught big and small groups of people about the history and moves of funk.

Piper is a light-skinned black woman artist and academic who came of age in the '70s. While she was doing her PhD at Harvard, she was also doing an ongoing performance of a character she called the "Mythic Being," who appeared as an angry black man sometimes causing fights on the streets—light years from rarefied classrooms. Her work has always been about the places where worlds intersect so badly that people shy away from the intersections rather than crossing them.

About Funk Lessons, she wrote, "My immediate aim in staging the large-scale performance (preferably with sixty people or more) was to enable everyone present to GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER."

In this context, that's a political aesthetic act. See more of Piper's works, as well as excerpts from her essays after the performances, "Notes on Funk," here.

And just look at this dancin.