The first workshop in this series of institutes exploring the legacies of slavery in Virginia sponsored by the Virginia Geographic Alliance took place in Richmond, Virginia, and explored Africanist aesthetic legacies in contemporary culture and performance. In this workshop, the authors were specifically interested in pursuing the intersecting terrain of cultural geography and the arts, especially dance and music. That is, with a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach, in this workshop, the authors aimed to bring the analytical lens of cultural geography together with the embodiment of culture, history, and forced migration as felt and experienced through dance and music. This article provides a brief introduction to Africanist aesthetic legacies in contemporary culture and performance and how the intersecting terrain of cultural geography and the arts revealed itself through the workshop. The authors outline the specific activities of the February 2014 workshop which they organized, and discussed some of the "breakthrough" moments of that workshop, and cite specific feedback they received from workshop participants. Later in this special section, they present a sample of the lesson plans that teacher-student groups created throughout the weekend that reflects the interdisciplinarity of the workshop and that can be widely adopted in any number of geographical contexts.