Cheers!

We would like to take a moment to thank each and everyone of you who made the XI edition of Dance Under Construction conference happen, with your charismatic presence, dedicated work and invaluable support. We had an incredibly productive weekend filled with academic presentations, performances, workshops, discussions, and lots of fun! Check out our press coverage at UCLA's Daily Bruin newspaper (link below). What an amazing turn out!
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/stories/2009/may/1/09-05-01-construction/
Cheers!

Randy Martin's "Art Attacks"

To download Randy Martin's article "Art Attacks," copy and paste the link below to the browser.

http://www.informaworld.com/index/787768050.pdf

If you encounter any difficulties, contact me at rosa.arte@gmail.com and I will forward the article to you via email.

NEW: updated schedule of events

click on the image below to enlarge it.

Registration Extended

For the ones who haven't signed up yet, registration deadline extended.
SIGN UP TODAY!

Register Online at
http://www.rsvpbook.com/event.php?477416




DANCE UNDER CONSTRUCTION (DUC) XI
Choreographing Politics/The Politics of Choreography

Friday, May 1st & Saturday May 2nd, 2009

hosted by UCLA's Department of World Arts & Cultures

Registration fee of $25 to be paid by check (payable to "UC Regents") on day of conference. (Please note, registration is free to UCLA students.) Registration fee includes one ticket to Friday night performance of 'Monster' by Pappas and Dancers (for non-UCLA registrants only), Saturday continental breakfast, and Saturday evening reception. **Pre-registration required.**

Seminar with Randy Martin: download articles

Saturday
3:00-5:00 PM: Seminar with Randy Martin (NYU)
(Room 208)

** To prepare for the seminar, we suggest reading two of his recent publications:
"Art Attacks" from Women and Performance Journal.

http://www.informaworld.com/index/787768050.pdf

"Allegories of Passing in Bill T. Jones" from Dance Research Journal.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dance_research_journal/v040/40.2.martin.pdf

Saturday: overview

May 2nd

Welcome Events: Breakfast & Registration
Glorya Kaufman Hall lounge

Breakfast from 8 to 9:30 AM

Registration from 8 AM to 1 PM

Gentle Yoga Class with Sara Wookey
From 8:00 to 8:50 AM (Room 214)

Conference Overview

9:00-10:20 AM: First Section

10:35-11:55 AM: Second Section

11:55 AM-1:00 PM: Lunch Break

1:00-2:30 PM: Keynote Address
Victoria Marks (UCLA)
Randy Martin (NYU)
(Glorya Kaufman Theater, Room 200 )

2:45-4:05 PM: Third Section

4:20-5:35 PM: Fourth Section

5:40-6:00 PM: Out of Studio Performance
Ally Voye

6:00-7:00PM: RECEPTION in the Garden

Friday: overview

May 1st

12:30 - 2:30 PM: Workshop with Victoria Marks (UCLA)
“Choreographing Democracy: improvisational exercises as the foundational materials of democracy”
(Room 214)

3:00-5:00 PM: Seminar with Randy Martin (NYU)
(Room 208)

** To prepare for the seminar, we suggest reading two of his recent publications:
"Art Attacks" from Women and Performance Journal.
http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/873635_770849120_787768050.pdf

"Allegories of Passing in Bill T. Jones" from Dance Research Journal.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dance_research_journal/v040/40.2.martin.pdf

5:30-7:00 PM: Dance Film Screening introduced by Catherine Cole, UCB
(Melnitz Hall 1409)
Featuring:
"Nora"
"Black Spring"
"Shake-Off"

8 PM: Performance: Rebecca Pappas "Monster"
(WAC, Theater 200)

**All non-UCLA conference attendees will
receive a free ticket to Monster. Please
make sure to pre-register!

Presenters' Bios

Jane Alexandre has been working in the New York City and area dance world for more than 30 years as a performer, writer, choreographer, director, producer and administrator. She is at present an artistic director of Evolve Dance, Inc.; the co-Director of the Y Dance Program at the Family YMCA at Tarrytown; and a doctoral student at Antioch University’s Ph.D. Program in Leadership and Change, investigating the question of how socially engaged dance artists lead from positions of informal authority.


Sima Belmar, B.A. Russian and History, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; M.A. Russian Literature, Stanford University; M.F.A. Dance, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Former dance critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Interests include: gender, gesture (specifically, Neapolitan and Jewish), nation, and local and transnational identities as they relate to the language of dance; alternative training techniques for contemporary dancers and their potential impact on dance criticism.

Jessica Briggs received her B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Minnesota in May 2008. She presented her paper “Conscientious Objection: Female Bodies in Action” at last year’s CORD conference at Hollins University in Roanoke Virginia. Jessica Performs with Time Track Productions (Minneapolis, MN) and is program manager for Ananya Dance Theatre. Jessica has presented her choreography at the Lowry Lab Theater (St. Paul, MN), 9x22 Dance Lab (Minneapolis, MN), and is the current choreographer for the Zenon Scholarship Program (Minneapolis, MN).

Jennifer Buscher is a PhD candidate in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation project, iBody, explores the relationship between the body and technology through Apple’s iPod. She received a B.A. in English, with a minor in Dance, from the University of Kansas (2000) and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University (2001).

Alissa Cardone, interdisciplinary choreographer and performer, co-founder Kinodance Company, selected by Dance Magazine's "25-to-watch" in 2008, received commissions from Bank America Celebrity Series, World Music/CrashARTS at ICA Boston and produced by Monaco Dance Forum, the Berkshire Fringe, HIGH Fest (Armenia), Boston Cyberarts, A.P.E. Northampton, St. Petersburg International Dance Film Festival (Russia) and Festival of Arts & Ideas (New Haven). Cardone trained in Japan with Min Tanaka (Body Weather Farm), has collaborated and performed with Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works, Nora Chipaumire, Ann Carlson, Elaine Summers, Yoshito Ohno and ‘Nijinski of Butoh' Akira Kasai.


Szu-Ching Chang is currently a third-year Ph.D student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research interest focuses on Taiwanese female choreographers in relation to the issues of gender, cultural memory, postcolonialism and nationalism.

Living and working in San Francisco and Berlin, choreographer and director Jess Curtis has created an award-winning body of work ranging from the underground extremes of Mission District warehouses with Contraband and CORE (1985-1998) to the formal refinement of European State Theaters with Cie. Cahin-Caha and Jess Curtis/Gravity (1998-present). He has taught as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley and the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is currently in the MFA program at UC Davis.

Ashley Ferro-Murray is a choreographer who uses interactive performance technologies as a means for exploring dance and new media in our contemporary culture. Ashley is currently a Performance Studies PhD student in the Performance Studies Program at UC Berkeley.

Marcela Fuentes is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cultures in the Transnational Perspective program at UCLA where she also teaches transnational performance courses in the department of Theater, Film and Television. She received her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University in May 2008. Her work explores embodiment as event in online and offline performances in the Americas in response to global capital. Marcela also works in theater, performance art, and independent radio as a director, producer, dramaturg, and performer. As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with dancers Victoria Anderson and Liz Dement in two pieces of her authorship—Still Life and Training a Dramaturg—and in Anderson and Dement’s Debbie’s Debbie.

Doran George, best known for being encased in bricks and mortar in a south London shopping mall, is currently artist-in-residence at the Alzheimer's Association in Northridge. He researches the significance of the body in object based, durational, relational and movement work and is currently investigating cultural constructions of mortality in PhD research. He’s been funded, commissioned and presented in Britain, Continental Europe and the US. He curates cutting edge performance and related symposia and has danced for a diversity of choreographers. He is published in several print, web based journals and art publications and has taught at major Universities, Art Colleges and Dance Centers in the UK, US, the Netherlands and Portugal.

Tania Hammidi is a doctorate candidate in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside who works on drag king cabaret, durational performance, and LGBTQ dance. Tania is currently in the completion stages of her entitled, Dress, Dance Desire: Costume and a Sartorial History of the State.

Arianne Hoffman is a German born choreographer, currently in my second year of the M.F.A. program at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. I create scored improvisations and make work about gender and power. My work has been shown around Los Angeles and Berlin, Germany, where I used to be part of the performance art collective Rent-a-friend. Other projects include the video Lincoln in the Hood, which screened at VideoDance 2004 (Athens) and AN EARFUL OF DANCE, a series of podcast conversations on dance, partially funded by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA).

Melissa Hudson is a 2nd year MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her work as a professional choreographer and dance scholar has been devoted to investigating themes and images that examine the overlap between ‘food culture’ and ‘performance culture’, particularly as this takes place within the genre of postmodern contemporary dance performance. Melissa is also a certified pilates instructor and the artistic director of HudsonDance, a small San Francisco based dance company.

Adanna Jones is a 2nd year PhD student in Critical Dance Studies at UCR. At the moment, her pursuits include hip hop/rumba scene in Cuba and the winin’ scene in Trinidad. Ultimately, her goal is to lay bare the under-noticed/naturalized bodily labors and politics that continue to foster ideas of heteronormativity, gender, class, and race with in these contexts.

Elizabeth Kurien is a 3rd Year PhD candidate at the Department of Critical Dance Studies, UCR. A performer of experimental and Indian classical (Mohiniyattom and Bharatanatyam) Dance, Elizabeth’s research interest focuses on the politics of cultural capital - how traditional South Asian art forms, specifically Kudiyattom declared in 2001 by UNESCO as one of the “Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Human Heritage” gains currency as cultural capital in globalization.

Ann Mazzocca received her MA in Dance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures in 2001. For the past seven years she has been performing and teaching Haitian folkloric dance based out of NYC. She recently relocated to Riverside, CA to attend UCR’s MFA program in Experimental Choreography.

Paloma McGregor’s choreography has been presented in New York at such venues as Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, SolarOne Arts Festival and New Dance Group, as well as The Dance Place in Washington, D.C., and Cleveland Public Theatre. She is associate artistic director of INSPIRIT dance company, co-founder of Angela’s Pulse Performance Projects with lifelong collaborator and sister, Patricia, and is in her fourth season as a dancer with Urban Bush Women.

Elliot Gordon Mercer is a graduate of the Idyllwild Arts Academy and a student in Saint Mary’s College of California’s Liberal Education for Arts Professionals (LEAP) program. Elliot has performed professionally with several San Francisco-based companies, dancing works by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Antony Tudor, and Paul Taylor, among others.

Betsy Miller is a graduate fellow at the Ohio State University, where she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Dance. She is a co-founder of Propel-her Dance Collective (www.propelherdance.com). Propel-her is a choreographic collective based in New York City which provides administrative infrastructure to foster the careers of emerging female choreographers through a collaborative structure. Betsy has worked administratively with the José Limón Dance Foundation, WHITE WAVE Dance, Bates Dance Festival, Doug Varone and Dancers, and the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance, and on the youth advisory panel of Dance/NYC, marking a passion for supporting the work of both established and emerging artists in the field. Her choreography has been presented at the d.u.m.b.o. dance festival, The Chocolate Factory, Merce Cunningham Studio, Spoke the Hub, the Cool New York Dance Festival, Williamsburg Art Nexus, and other venues. She is on the faculty of Powell Dance Academy in Powell, Ohio and holds a B.A. in Dance from Connecticut College.


Taisha Paggett is a Los Angeles based dance artist and co-editor of the dance journal project, itch. Her work and collaborations for the stage, gallery, and public sphere have been presented and supported by several venues throughout California as well as in Chicago, New York City and Utrecht, The Netherlands. She has worked extensively in the projects of Victoria Marks and David Rousseve, and is a member of the audio action collective, Ultra-Red. She holds an MFA from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Mara Penrose is a dancer, mother, and student based in Columbus, OH. Her research interests include dance reconstruction, analysis of movement and choreography, somatics, and the historical uses of mass dance for social and political agenda. She plans to reconstruct a 1920’s movement choir from the Labanotation score in partial fulfillment of a Master in Fine Arts Degree at Ohio State University.

Crisina Rosa, visual artist, dance practitioner, researcher. Born in Brasilia, Brazil, Rosa crossed the US border in 1996 and, after a series of performative actions, she received a Master degree in Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rosa's visual artwork, primarily drawing and photography, has been exhibited both in Brazil and US. As a dance researcher, her interest leans towards the transatlantic black presence in the Americas pertaining embodied practices. Rosa is currently a PhD candidate at the department of World Arts and Cultures, at UCLA. The title of her dissertation is ““Moving Scripts: Ginga, Choreography, and the Formation of Gendered and National Identities in Brazil.”

Tim Rubel is a dance and theatre artist. His choreography has been presented in and around Providence, Boston, Cape Cod and Los Angeles. He is a second year MFA student at UC Riverside pursuing a degree in Experimental Choreography.

Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist active in dance, theater, performance, media, and installation art. He has performed nationally and internationally in Asia, Europe, and throughout the USA and received numerous grants, including awards from Arts International, Meet the Composer, Asian Cultural Council, Japan Foundation, and others. Michael has also been a guest lecturer and guest artist teaching butoh and improvisational dance and interdisciplinary performance at California Institute of the Arts, UC Irvine, UCLA, University of Redlands, and ASU, among others.

Carolina San Juan is a Doctoral Candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. While her dissertation focuses on American Vaudeville in the Philippines, her research interests include the intersection of imperialism with popular culture, visual arts, and performance.

Hannah Schwadron is pursuing an MFA in Experimental Choreography at the University of California, Riverside, and is currently researching the contemporary implications of Jewish family history as it relates to politics of historical writing and aesthetics of religiosity. After graduating from Brown University with a BA in American
Civilization, Hannah taught high school theater and history in Oakland, CA, where she wrote and directed dramatic and musical plays for high school students. She has studied dance and Qi Gong primarily under NY based choreographer, Yin Mei and has taught dance at Queens College and the University of California at Riverside.

Anna B. Scott is a scholar artist who rides the edge of the logical into the heart of chaos, seeking the eye of the storm, where all is calm amidst the turbulence. She is a professor of dance history and theory at the University of California, Riverside. Her work seeks to elucidate the ways that our everyday is a series of grand, minute and interlocking choreographies; choreographies that often have no tangible presence, yet are ever-present in the ways in which we go about our daily lives, or don't. She has presented her performance work at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, MIT, Williams and Brown University as part of the RISD/Brown Performance Art Series. Lately, she has been caught in the act in Los Angeles at the Anatomy Riot and Highways Performance Space.

Shelley Senter has been involved with experimental and post-modern dance for 20 years, touring throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Russia as a performer, choreographer, director and teacher. She has worked independently and with many artists in NYC, West Coast and international dance communities, including Bebe Miller, Yvonne Rainer, Nina Martin, Susan Rethorst, Wally Cardona, Linda K. Johnson and AXIS Dance company, among many others. She danced with the Trisha Brown Company from ‘86-‘91 and has continued to work with the company as a guest artist, directing special projects and staging Brown’s choreography throughout the US and abroad. Senter has been critically recognized for her distinct approach to movement and is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique™, which she teaches worldwide. She was recently awarded a San Francisco Bay Area Isadora Duncan (“Izzy”) award.

Asheley B. Smith is a first year doctoral candidate in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside. Her research interests include the relationship between funding and aesthetics and the National Performance Network. Asheley holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Dance and History from Oberlin College.

Kate Speer’s work ranges from performance, choreography, and research scholarship. Her most recent research investigated the presence of African contemporary dance in France and the current trends in Francophone Africa, which is compiled in a paper titled, “The Globalization of Contemporary Dance in Francophone Africa: Embodying Cultural Identity While Discovering the New.” Speer holds a BA in dance and biology from Swarthmore College

Tamara Spira is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments at UC Santa Cruz, where she studies the sensual logics and erotic economies of globalization’s regimes of violence, as well as the poetics and aesthetics of survival, hope, and political transformation. Mari has published and presented works individually and collectively in the fields of feminism, cultural studies, politics, and security studies. She has also worked as a labor and community organizer and is currently involved in collective struggles against mass incarceration in California and its surrounding economies of war, transnationally.

Waewdao Sirisook (Choreographer/Dancer) is from the area of Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand. She first studied dance within her village community. In 2005, Waewdao came to UCLA to earn an MFA in Dance/Choreography. She was a 2006 APPEX Fellow and a recipient of a major fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council. In America, she has come face to face with the Western idea of the “Authentic Asian” and its implications for dance movement. She has realized that dance means something different in Los Angeles than it does in Chiang Rai.

Melissa Templeton is a second year PhD student at the University of California Riverside. Her current research examines the relationship between Québec language policies and dance in Montreal.

Rosie Trump is a dance choreographer, filmmaker, performer, and educator. With a hybrid artistic practice, Trump’s work navigates the creative fusion between dance and media. Embedded with ironic wit and nostalgic sensibility, her work examines subject matter such as iconic representations of femininity, domesticity, identity and intimacy. Originally from Pittsburgh, Trump graduated from Slippery Rock University Summa Cum Laude with a BA in Dance. Trump received a MFA in Experimental Dance Choreography from UC Riverside in 2007 where she was a three-time recipient of the Gluck Fellowship of the Arts and a recipient of the Humanities Graduate Student Research Grant. Currently, she is an associate dance faculty member at Mt. San Jacinto College.

Ally Voye began her dance training in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Life Arts Center. She graduated from the World Arts and Cultures department at UCLA in 2005 where she studied extensively and performed with Maria Gillespie and Victoria Marks, among others. Her choreography and film work has been presented at the Freud Playhouse, American College Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Highways Performance Space, Anatomy Riot, UCLA’s Fowler Museum, UCLA’s Hothouse Choreography Residency, Victoria Reel Dance Film Festival and Kinetic Cinema NYC. Ally is co-artistic director of IN/EX Dance Project, a certified Pilates trainer and teaches dance at several schools in Los Angeles.

Laura Vriend is a 3rd year PhD Student in Critical Dance studies at UCR. With occasional forays into the cultural politics of Canadian identity formation, Laura’s major research focuses on intersections between experimental dance, architecture and spirituality in Philadelphia. This research will take its form as ethnographic studies of churches and spaces of mourning that double as rehearsal and performance spaces.

Sara Wolf is a PhD candidate, teaching fellow, and Javitz Fellow in UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures; a freelance dance critic for the Los Angeles Time; and co-editor of the dance journal itch. Her dissertation examines twenty-first-century postmodern dance, performance, and activist interventions as citizen choreographies of political bodies that re-imagine the body politic and formulate critical alternatives to national identifications in an era of global capital, media, and war.

Meg Wolfe is a Los Angeles-based choreographer, whose work has been presented nationally and internationally since 1990. On the west coast, she has presented work at Highways Performance Space, California Institute for the Arts, REDCAT/Studio, The Unknown Theater, Anatomy Riot, Sea and Space Explorations, The East/West Coast Performance Festival (San Diego); Performance Works NorthWest (Portland, OR), and other venues. She is the founder and curator of the monthly performance series, Anatomy Riot, running since October 2005; co-editor of the L.A. dance journal, itch; and the founder/director of DANCEbank.

Allison Wyper is a movement based performance artist and artistic director of San Francisco’s Black Stone Ensemble. She has performed with Black Stone Ensemble, Guillermo Gomez-Pena/La Pocha Nostra, Violeta Luna, Sara Shelton Mann, Scrap and Salvage, paige starling sorvillo/blindsight, Pilgrim Theatre, Culture Clash, and her former company The Circus, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston. She earned a BA in Theatre Studies at Emerson College and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Hentyle Yapp is finishing his last year at UCLA School of law, focusing in Critical Race Theory and Public Interest Law. He used to dance professionally with companies in New York City and Taipei, Taiwan. He received a BA from Brown University, majoring in French Literature.

Abstracts

Saturday, May 2nd

FIRST SESSION 9-10:20 AM

Praxis, Process, and Performance as Methodology: The Performance is Political
Room #208
Moderator: David Gere (Professor, UCLA)

Discolevel3.proj
Carolina San Juan (UCLA) and Hana Van Der Kolk (UCLA)

Originally presented in March 2007 as a 15-minute work for the theater, discolevel3.proj was a series of intersections: between Disco and minimalist, modernist aesthetic, between rehearsal and performance, between form and narrative, and between the politicized bodies (by race, gender, and training) of Carolina San Juan and Hana van der Kolk. In our lecture we will outline and theorize our collaboration and initial performance, with a focus on how what we learned through making this piece might inform future works. In an attempt to clarify this discussion we will present our mathematical-style equation for understanding the making of dances that prioritize specified states of consciousness as integral to the choreography. In the case of discolevel3.proj this equation serves to deepen and clarify our examination of Carolina's personal relationship to Disco (as the soundtrack of much of her childhood and Martial Law in the Philippines) in the creation and performance of the project. Through diagrams, video clips, and embodied examples, our lecture will parse out what we were attempting withdiscolevel3.proj and what we will attempt with future work, creating a second performance in the process.


By Definition
Paloma McGregor (Case Western)

Race is inherently political. And during this past election season, it was explicitly political. The race construct was both challenged and reinforced by Barack Obama’s multiplicity of identities; raised by white Midwestern grandparents, his hyphenated blackness is African in origin and his formative American experience came from Pan-Asian Hawaii.

Obama’s presence on the world political stage illuminated multiple layers of racial experience beyond the check mark in a US Census box. By Definition is a solo about race created to trans-personalize this intensely personal subject by mining the choreographic potentials of costume and sound. The work is rooted in a costume of deconstructed, multi-hued pantyhose. In this layered second-skin, the solo figure navigates the connections and distinctions, the potentials and limitations, the literal and metaphoric.

The movement is bound by the capacity of the costume materials and, by extension, it is bound by our willingness to grapple with the trappings of our racial experiences. The soundscore uses dictionary entries to reexamine and expand what we “know,” and to highlight how such expansion can dramatically alter our individual and collective understanding.

The dance has been presented in New York at Spoke the Hub, BRIC and New Dance Group, as well as MOCA/Cleveland and Mather Dance Center. I plan to expand the work for 2010, therefore this presentation will provide an opportunity for this work to receive peer feedback and begin its next stages in development.


In Relation
Hanna Schwadron (UC Riverside) and Rosie Trump (UCR, Mt. San Jacinto)

When Rosie Trump and Hannah Schwadron began collaborating on a new work, what became apparent was the overlap of their two distinct choreographic focuses. Where Rosie’s work considers through video and dance a nostalgia for the lost material aesthetic of women and their homes in the 1950’s, Hannah is focusing on the particulars of her own Jewish family history, asking questions about the movement of memory, and specifically the bodily implications of her grandmother’s holocaust narrative on a contemporary understanding of history, place and identity. Both interested in the stories of their grandparents’ generation, and specifically in the work and roles of women, the two share a vision of time-ordered geographies that frame an understanding of a once-removed past as a way of coming to terms with a more nebulous autobiographical present.

Where the pairing of family histories provides opportunity to pay homage to a certain idealist vision of an earlier time, it also lends itself to points of relational contact that connect disparate movements of the WWII and postwar era in surprising ways. Both current and historical, the intersections tell a version of feminist history that locates itself en route. In Relation views dance “in relation” to objects, to women, to labor, on and in doing so, lends itself to a post-modern choreographic juxtaposition that weaves biography and representation in an exploration of legacy and memory beyond national and religious boundaries. As the title suggests, the thematic thread conceives spatially of more personal, or intimate relationships, where the politics of recollection and reflection develop through partnering. Alongside the two performers live the ghosts of phantasm imaginings in this danced discovering of memory as material.


Mind/Body/Spirit Reclamation Act: A Movement-Based Performance Workshop
Room #214
Michael Sakamoto (UCLA)

The title and modus operandi of this proposed workshop is a legislative bill put forward in a “congress” of mind, body, and spirit. It is a call to arms against our “selves,” the ones that we are not. We live in an age where mass media has overwhelmed our daily lives beyond the latter 20th Century phenomenon of broadcast television saturation and packaged, off-the-shelf, audio-visual experiences. Dominant ideologies invade our very bodies on an hourly basis through massive socio-economic dependence on portable listening, communication, and computing devices. The post-industrial, service-oriented, commodified body has become a literal consumer of its virtual self. We are practically eating our “selves” alive.

Utilizing pedagogical and participatory techniques rooted in Butoh, postmodern dance, and improvisational performance, this movement-based performance workshop will operate from the premise that one of the only ways for any person to fully “unpack” and disengage from unwanted socialized habits and tendencies in their daily mental and behavioral patterns is to deconstruct their embodied modes of being. Participants are led through gestural and image-based exercises designed to decipher, interpret, and literally “break” limiting thought, language, and actions (self-defined), empowering their mind/body instruments via semi-improvised structures that perform vulnerable, “dis-abled” version of themselves in order to reclaim their identities, moment by changing moment, in the very process of cyclical self-destruction and reintegration. We will attempt to transform in the moment into ostensibly “broken” forms, partially-readable signs assembled from damaged codes and finally presented as ostensibly disturbing, semi-unconsumable commodities, inherently sacred and chaotically and absolutely knowable to ourselves and witnessing others.


Contested Embodiments and Post-colonial Identities
Room #101
Moderator: David Shorter (Professor, UCLA)

Bodily Syncopation: Choreographing Race, Gender, and Sexuality within Coloniality of Power
Cristina Rosa (UCLA)

This presentation excavates the extent to which the ideas cultivated within samba have contributed towards the decoloniality of knowledge, that is, the de-racialization and de-genderization of experience in the Lusitanian diaspora. Through choreographed acts, I argue, samba dancers have recuperated-cum-invented non-hegemonic embodied knowledges, as well as reclaimed their (imagined) subjectivity, informed by their bio-ethnicity, worldviews, and socio-political alliances. Coloniality of knowledge builds on the pre-existing hierarchy of race and gender that, in the Western world, derives from Greco-Roman religious thought (Mignolo 2008). Following Mignolo’s understanding of situated knowledge, bodily syncopation (ginga) will be taken here as a corporeal apparatus of enunciation. Although ginga might be understood, in isolation, as a learned technique that arranges cultural bodies outside phenotype markers, Afro-Brazilians have deployed that aesthetic to produce knowledges situated within their bio-political and geo-historical locations.

Here, the knowledge ginga articulates will be read against its colonial translation into written documents, pictorial imagery and staged performances. By contrasting the different repertoires and archives produced around the aesthetic of ginga, this paper examines the negotiation over the control of labor, sex, intersubjectivity, and collective authority within Modernity/Coloniality (Quijano 2000). While corporeal oratures Africans (re)produced under captivity have been historicized as deviant, irrational, and unethical, for example, after the Abolition there is a movement towards the embedment of that aesthetic within the Brazilian hegemonic discourse of national identification. Hence, understanding the ways in which ginga works, and the ideas it enables, are both crucial to the mapping of Brazil’s bio-politics and geo-politics of knowledge.

Roots/Routes : Staging Taiwanness in Legend Lin’s choreography 醮 (The Mirror of Life)
Szu-Ching Chang (UC Riverside)

This paper examines how Legend Lin’s choreography, 醮(Jiao) (Mirrors of Life), employs local Daoist rituals to embody Taiwanese identity on local and global stages. First, this paper tracks why these local rituals are noticed by many Taiwanese artists and what their original meanings are for general Taiwanese people. I want to argue that these discourses and practices not only relate to emerging Taiwanese identity but also respond to western interests in Asian rituals. Second, this paper investigates how Legend Lin transforms and translates these local meanings for urban and global audience, instead of simply performing these original rituals on stage. Through exploring her chorographical strategies and relative texts, this paper further focuses on her specific bodily aesthetic, the ritual-like female dancing body, to discuss her concern to “return” to a Taiwanese/oriental body. Through these analyses, I want to argue that Legend Lin carefully carves out a space both locally and globally to face the challenges of reinterpreting these ritual traditions in Taiwan and of relocating these values and meanings as global cultural capital. The slowly moving dancing body in her choreography also metaphorically reveals the unfixed Taiwanese identity, which is always in motion.


Between Shakira and Al Qaeda: How does the popularity of Belly dance coexist with terrorist narratives in American Popular Culture?
Meiver De La Cruz (Simmons College)

The central question is an exploration of what initially seems to be a contradiction: the recent popularity of belly dance in the US post September 11th, 2001. Post 9/11 the American nationalist narrative has demonized Arabs and Arab culture, presenting them as the enemy in a proposed clash of civilizations in order to garner support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arab cultures have been designated as the source of terrorist ideologies. At the same time, a dance commonly believed to have originated in the Arab world becomes more popular than ever before in America. While the the United States has claimed a desire to “liberate” Arab women from the backwardness of Islamist culture, the dance of this supposedly oppressed Arab woman is used as the source of the American woman’s sexual liberation. Do American belly dancers recognize the cultural authority of Arab women with regards to this dance in the context of imperialism? Does the popularity and practice of dances of Arab origin in the US serve as a source of cultural understanding and mutual acceptance, or are they a new tool of imperialism? This paper explores how the institutionalized terror narrative is negotiated (or erased) by American belly dancers, so as to leave the dance, the music and the culture that surrounds it harmless and accessible. I’m proposing that the way the dance is taught and practiced in America places the dance purposefully outside of it’s cultural context with one of two results: as the dance is divorced from the culture, it is recreated, and appropriated in a purely American context it is “sanitized” from any associations with the terror narrative. By inventing new ways of exoticizing the Orient, American belly dance hybrids can also serve as a way to reinforce rather than contest the dominant narratives about Arabs and the Arab world. Further, I am interested in looking at how the American versions of the dance are then exported (and even re-exported in the Arab world) due to American global hegemony, and capitalism. This paper will be based primarily on textual analysis covering the topics of dance, culture, feminism, imperialism and Orientalism. It will attempt to address questions of authority, appropriation, sexuality, and cultural perceptions.


Bodies of Potential: Choreography and Social Change
Room #153
Moderator: Judy Mitoma (Professor, UCLA)

Choreography and Sociopolitical Activism in San Francisco: Confronting Environmental Destruction Through Dance
Elliot Gordon Mercer (Saint Mary’s College)

This paper explores the ways in which three San Francisco-based choreographers confront environmental destruction. My analysis of works by Joanna Haigood, Brenda Way, and Margaret Jenkins examines how dance has the potential to encourage social and political change through its capacity to become a platform for environmental activism. In this paper I first investigate Joanna Haigood’s self-performed solo, Allegory (1991), which portrays the individual as a political body capable of exerting power over nature. I then turn to ODC/Dance’s artistic director Brenda Way and an analysis of her 2005 work, On a Train Heading South, which visualizes the relationship between contemporary society, global politics, the environmental movement, and the natural environment itself. Lastly, I explore Margaret Jenkins’ Other Suns (2008), which links global warming to the melting of political and social stability in the 21st century. Taken together, these works physicalize and mobilize the activist potential of dance.


Re/De-Orientalized Ornaments: the Body in Shen Wei’s Choreography
Hentyle Yapp (UCLA)

In Visuality and Identity, Shu-mei Shih examines the positionality of the flexible subject and her cultural production, arguing for the importance of situating the work within its various global contexts: “As the particular practice and usage of a medium relies heavily on local and other contexts for its signifying function, the geopolitical, spatial, as well as historical contexts of a given articulation become necessary…” (Shih 2007).

This essay applies this framework to dance studies, where the body becomes the primary site of analysis to explore issues of materiality and representation. More specifically, I focus on Shen Wei, principal choreographer for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and director of his New York-based dance company, to further explore Shih’s framework.

I view Shen Wei as a flexible subject, exploring how he is affected by and affects Asian/American racialization. In addition, I analyze the juridical and social contexts in which his work exists. I posit that his work, specifically Map and Connect-Transfer, appeal to an “avant-gardism” that furthers a neoliberal, post-race project. Wei’s work erases race, gender, and identity from the body. He achieves this through his use of mass ornamentation, a concept I glean from Siegfried Kracauer.

I will explore Wei’s dual positionality as racialized Asian other and avant-garde American artist, comparing his position to that of Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun. Both artists were paired together to open the 2008 season of City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival. This pairing provides a site to explore racialization, neoliberalism, and the body.


Linking Potentiality and Activism in Dance
Kate Speer (Swarthmore)

This proposal for a paper presentation examines the choreographies of David Dorfman, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Jérôme Bel whose work links potentiality and activism in order to illustrate dance’s possibilities for instigating social change.

Social movements present an abstract representation of potentiality, while dance is more visible due to the kinetic principles underling the moving body. The moving body exploits potential energy to catapult the body through new movement. Thus the potentiality for social change can be corporeally explored through dance and expressed in theatrical representations intended to ignite audiences.

David Dorfman cultivates social awareness in his piece underground (2006) which explores the violent tactics used by the domestic terrorist group Weather Underground. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar goes beyond theatrical presentations with her company Urban Bush Women to found a Summer Leadership Institute that helps youth link art and social activism in creative and practical workshops. Jérôme Bel’s piece The Show Must Go On empowers the audience by allowing their participation and reaction to dictate the atmosphere of the performance.

Artist like Dorfman, Zollar, and Bel are using potentiality as a positive reserve of energy to empower audiences and organize communities toward social awareness. As role models, these artists show the link between dance and community, making a home for the arts in everyone’s life. Artists, as these three demonstrate, have the potential to root themselves in communities and become an essential commodity for social progress.


SECOND SESSION, 10:35-11:55 AM

Women’s Work and War
Room #208
Moderator: Marcela Fuentes (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Theater, UCLA)

What is “women’s work”? To care for the wounded? Preserve the home and the family unit? Maintain composure and beauty in the face of horror and chaos? Support her husband? Child-rearing? Child-bearing? Traditional arts and crafts, such as weaving, sewing or basket making?

Three short solo dance theatre works by choreographers Arianne Hoffmann, Alissa Cardone, and Allison Wyper confront issues of domesticity, violence, and responsibility. Cardone, Hoffmann and Wyper use archetypal roles of wife and mother as a lens through which to interrogate violence in both private and public spheres.

Hoffmann’s body-in-restraint speaks to the “Reconstruction” of white American female domesticity in the 1890s. Wyper uses a good wife/whore dichotomy to investigate the limits of American patriotism under the Bush regime. Cardone embodies both the soldier on the battlefront and the woman on the home front, in a touching and complex look at the different faces of the war effort.

Looming over these three works is the pregnant presence of war—the War on Terror, World War II, the U.S. Civil War, all wars. While battle strategies and peace talks are made in centers of hegemonic power, the mess of the destruction of life and culture is ultimately dumped into the home, where women are left with the task of mending, maintaining, and repairing broken families and lives.

Legs
Alissa Cardone (UCLA)

The idea is to consider a soldier’s work and a woman’s work in wartime equally dire and dirty – the physical and emotional horror existing for both despite the variation of scene (battlefield, factory, home). In “Legs,” by embodying both solider and woman I probe these sides within myself in search of (im)possible resolution. I take the body as microcosm, conjuring states of confusion, care, mourning and power to attempt a moral meditation on the devastating effects of a country’s call to arms.

The background of this piece touches both a personal and a global history. During WWII the US government aggressively campaigned to women to join the workforce as men disappeared, being drafted or enlisted into the military. Although this opened up tremendous opportunity for women to learn skills and take up positions previously kept by men the empowering effect was temporary. Bittersweet. As men returned to the workplace women were expected to return home. My grandmother did. After being forced to quit her job at a Nabisco factory upon my grandfather’s unexpected return from France on honorary discharge she returned to the home, later developing undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He was a member of the 329th infantry, what they called "the legs of the war".


My Husband, My Country
Allison Wyper (UCLA)

My Husband, My Country is a solo dance theatre work confronting my ambiguous relationship with a country I know and love in the face of the inhuman brutality of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other sites of illegal torture. In this piece I confront my own pain, anger, and guilt over being implicated in torture, as an American, by siting the violation on myself. Through my character I play both the victim and the torturer–but here the victim is an American housewife, the torturer an abusive husband. Thus I seek to begin to comprehend the pain of prisoners of war through the mode of domestic violence, wherein I am both the violator and the violated. This piece is a performance of protest against actions perpetrated by the Bush regime and millions of Americans who stood back and supported them, and it is an act of penance for those who let it happen, silently or not, in our name.


Home Sweet Home
Arianne Hoffmann (UCLA)

Home Sweet Home is based on instructions on “how to bone a chicken” (The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book 1896). This text serves as a movement metaphor throughout the piece. The result is a highly restraint body that struggles with its social conditions, caught in a violent, and a dichotic relationship of boning / being boned. Further, the metaphor is the connecting element between the white female body and the nation-building project after the civil war. As female domesticity gained cultural currency in the Victorian era, the white female body was both subject to physical restraint (in the home, by notions of appropriateness, by the dress code), and a propagator of suppression and violence herself (with domestic employees, in race relations, as mothers). While the piece does not offer a resolve or have moral implications, it has moments of disruptive, at times orgasmic appropriations of power.

Gender Moves: Don’t Put Your Stagnant Hegemony All Over My Active Body
Room #214
Moderator: Jennifer Fisher (Professor, UC Irvine)

Dear Betty Crocker: a danced exploration of American female domestic identity
Melissa Hudson (UC Riverside)

The project is a fifteen-minute excerpt from my most recent choreography examining the complex politics of consumption and desire, specifically as revealed in the rituals of American domestic food culture and the gendered roles therein. The work is grounded in an investigation of the fictional character Betty Crocker, a prototypical housewife figure created by General Mills Corporation in 1921. Through a creative imagining of the faces and spaces associated with Betty Crocker, my goal is to complicate the quintessential images of American housewives of the 1920s-1950s, considering how the fiction that Betty purports and the ‘reality’ of American female identity constitute and inform each other. The dance queries, how have people been affected by this historical un/reality and the way it is remembered socially? Of particular interest is the actual work of women who labored in the name of Betty – answering letters, writing and editing cookbooks, playing her on radio and television. The research reveals the indoctrination of white women in modern America (and perhaps non-white women as well – they are notably absented in Crocker lore) wherein domestic skill is equated with joy, social worth, and even civic duty. As such, making casserole becomes a project in self-improvement, baking cake a gesture of amorous love, chopping onions a sacrifice taken on by a dutiful and loyal citizen – all hopeful and passionate actions performed daily. In the choreography, the four dancers playing versions of Betty push back against the narratives that limit women’s domestic roles to that of dainty, diligent homemakers, revealing the messy reality behind Betty’s façade.

Men and Movements
Jess Curtis (UC Davis)

Beginning in the early 1970’s and developing to a peak of mainstream media attention in the early 1990’s with the publication of Robert Bly’s book Iron John, a book about men, a significant number of American men participated in activities that became collectively recognized as a “Men’s Movement.” The ‘”movement” was seen largely as a response to, or extension of, the feminist or women’s movements of the 60’s and 70’s.

Nearly simultaneously and without apparent explicit connections to this evolution of a social men’s movement, new forms of contemporary dance and performance practices were evolving that were also changing the way men (and women) moved. Contact Improvisation, which questioned many of the gender roles in traditional dance, allowed for a much broader range of physical interaction for both men and women, but at several significant times drew particular attention when it was practiced by groups of men. Not inconsequently, structural principles in the practice of Contact Improvisation can be seen as inherently democratic and anti-authoritarian. Contact Improvisation (CI) began to have a significant impact within both the realm of professional performing arts practice and a newly growing arena of participatory arts and cultural practices.

In this paper I look at a number of intersections between these two “movements” and argue that CI and other related movement and body-based performance practices were, and continue to be, significant contentious tools in the performance of disrupting hegemonic patterns of male dominance, homophobia, and militarism.

Caught in the Act
Jessica Briggs (University of Minnesota)

The essential recognition of sex as male/female and the socializations through gendering is the premise of my presentation. Over the past year, I have been creatively and discursively unpacking feminism on female bodies, now my interest has led me to locating feminism/femininity on male bodies. The term feminism is used as a lens of seeing movement and is the basis of theory that as a choreographer I will attempt to physicalize on a male body. This “move” from female bodies to male bodies will result in both a paper and a dance, one feeding the other through a series of research, improvisations, embodiment, discussions, and experiments between dancer Tim Rehborg, Stephanie Shirek, and myself. Fully aware of the failure of representation knowing that primarily we see the sexed male body and the assumed sexual orientation of a feminized male on stage will be most of what “we” read yet my exploration is the attempt to physicalize feminist theory and locate femininity as a movement choice on the male body. My methodology involves textual research on feminism and the body as well as explorations of movement. The decision to make both a paper and a dance was mainly from the amount of bodily knowledge that can give admittance into a deeper understanding of body reading. This paper is an attempt to re-evaluate the body and gender politics that are positioned on our dancing bodies.

The Jewish Body Moves
Room #101
Moderator: Lionel Popkin (Professor, UCLA)

Monster: A Performative Lecture
Rebecca Pappas (UCLA)

When is a dance about monsters also a dance about Jewishness? What do the Holocaust, Barbie dolls, and a two-headed creature have in common? In Monster- A Performative Lecture I utilize movement, words and images to walk viewers through the making of my ongoing choreographic series Monster. This project was birthed when I began to wonder at my own feelings of shame about looking Jewish but not feeling that way, and it grew as I began to examine the connections and fractures between Jewish identity, the Jewish body, the Holocaust and shameful, monstrous bodies. I was curious about how one sort of extreme monstrous body (the widely reproduced bodies of Holocaust victims) created and justified another (the pounding powerful bodies of the modern Israeli). The choreographic work uses personal sources of shame to create theatrical, monstrous creatures and looks for the places where these creatures cross and speak to the history of the Jewish body. This lecture attempts to trace the sources of this choreography looking for the origin stories of my own monsters and analyzing how these originations are expressed in my choreographic process. It draws on the work of Ernst van Alphen, Dora Apel, and Sander Gilman to examine how my own choreography fits into larger discourses about and depictions of the Jewish body.


Toward a Study of Vulnerability and Manhood in Israel
Yehuda Sharim (UCLA)

The summer of 1993 was like no other. I was eighteen. As for many others, the draft was about to signify a new start in my life. Immediately after the recruitment officer signed my papers, I offered the ultimate sacrifice to the Israeli army. I was ready for it but you are never really ready for this. Now a property of the nation, I was impelled to forsake my taken-for-granted privacy in favor of my new inamorata, the fear of and triumph over death.

I will attempt to track what Michel Foucault might have named the “genealogy” of the soldier’s body and its representation in the Israeli state. First, I will engage with historical material concerning the evolution of the typical soldiers’ body and its relation to gender binaries particularly pertaining to masculinity. Next, I will address fundamental Zionist ideas that attempted to re-imagine the regenerated Jewish male as militant and potent. One example is the work of the Zionist ideologist Max Nordau (1902) who envisaged male European Jews as muscular (Muskeljudenthum]. Lastly, I will look at the Jewish men part of the national project. Here I refer to this body, in terms of the nation’s body, a political body, and a physical body. I will speculate on the Israeli soldier’s problematic resemblance to the European aesthetics and values of manhood. Additionally, I will question how these contemporary depictions evoke ethnic boundaries as the inferiority of other bodies, like the Mizrahi (Jews from Arab lands) male or any features of Arabness that are measured against the aesthetics of the Israeli nation.


The Jewish Body: Reflections on Gender Stereotypes
David Gorshein (UCLA)

In “Dancing on the Needle’s Edge: Gay Lingo in an Israeli Disco,” Liora Moriel argues that Israeli Jews and Arabs have adopted what she terms gay English in the process of queer identification. Moriel’s theorization of linguistic politics proceeds from Judith Butler’s critique of the performativity of gender. Moriel writes, “If ‘the gendered body is performative,’ as Butler argues – and if, as I maintain, a body’s gendering is arbitrary – then what you see is what you get. But what you get is not necessarily what it seems; language choice can be as arbitrary as gender choice.” Thus Moriel argues that English is falsely deemed ungendered, adopted as a bridge of “access and connection to the (imagined) worldwide LGBT community. Israel’s position in the hub of the Near East, flanked by Arab states and a Palestinian Authority poised to become a state, dictates both insularity from and openness to differences.”

The political ambiguities underlying Moriel’s assertion about the nationalized body, and the collapse in her statement of embodiment and semiotics, is indicative of deterritorialization underpinning the transnational perpetuation of “queer.” How does queer identification implicate and reflect in language? How does the import of “queer” into this particular context relate to the nationalization of bodies? How (inter)national is the Middle Eastern queer body? My analysis will regard performance as a crucial site in responding to these questions, drawing from a close reading of “Israel Eats Itself,” a performance-installation by Canadian artist Tobaron Waxman.


Dancing With The Digital: The Macro Politics of Micro Technologies
Room #153
Moderator: Sheron Wray (Assistant Professor, UC Irvine)

The Choreography of the Click Wheel
Jennifer Buscher (UC Riverside)

Technology is a bodily practice, but it is also a learned practice. A seamless interface between the user and the device facilitates the production of a sense of naturalization and inevitability. Taught how to navigate the expanse between body and data, users acquire skills which are micro-choreographies unto themselves: spinning the click wheel of an iPod, swiping a credit card, stroking a mouse track pad, or sliding across a touch screen. In this paper, I will explore the reciprocal relationship between bodies and technology – how bodies evolve in relation to the digital devices they use and how technology is designed in relation to the body (user interface design). I will also examine a series of Apple advertisements that I am categorizing as ‘how to’ ads. In addition to promoting the product, these advertisements teach the user the choreographies required to use the digital device. I am also interested in how bodies are trained to consume through their relationship to a digital device – how the swiping of a credit card through a point-of-sale machine becomes a bodily practice. There is a series of Visa check card commercials that literally teaches the viewer/consumer how to perform this dance of consumption. Through this research on user interface design and an analysis of these advertisements, I am interested in the following questions: What is the corporeal experience in the digital age? And how is this corporeal experience defined in relation to practices of consumption?

Patenting Performance: Technology and/as the Everyday
Asheley Ferro-Murray (UC Berkeley)

Contemporary technologies like the iPhone are quickly becoming prosthetics upon which many rely. Often, these technologies introduce new movement vocabulary, such as those digital (in the physical sense) micro-sweeping movements that are necessary to use a touch screen device. In this paper, I consider how these everyday movements themselves can work in contemporary dance choreography. Whether literally, or figuratively, we can cite everyday movement trends and explore the technologies upon which they depend. Where, though, does this take us in the trajectory of dance history and scholarship?

As I use Loop Driver by Troika Ranch to consider how digital technology in dance can work to deconstruct and reference theoretically anachronistic political and social implications (such as “the gaze”), I facilitate a theoretical deconstruction of social politics, which I explain are not so “new” in what we call “new media.” The performance politic in new media focused dance, for example, seems to come perilously close to that of classical ballet. Choreographers have worked to explore outside of traditional audience/performer relationships that are perpetuated by a proscenium arena. Can using new media, though, become a counterproductive tool? Dancers and choreographers have used new media and digital presence to deconstruct a historically objectified dancer, but only to return to what I call a different form of objectification.

As I acknowledge how dance history is ever present within contemporary work, I will discuss how we can use digital performance technologies to focus on historically rooted performance politics and consider their importance in a contemporary situation.

Virtual Reconstruction of a Movement Choir Using Wii Remote as Interface
Mara Penrose (OSU)
Rudolf Laban’s movement choirs were performance pieces, but also a form of ideological instruction for their participants. The Nintendo Wii, a gaming interface that allows the user to interact with animation through movement, is examined as a mass-dance form analogous to movement choirs. The two phenomena are mediators between amateur moving bodies and their political and social environments. These are placed in a context of other uses of mass dance for ideological purposes in the French and Socialist Revolutions and the North Korean Mass Games. Rudolf Laban, along with many in post-World War I Germany dreamed of a new, cleaner, and healthier society. An early Labanotation score of Laban’s Titan provides information about Laban’s view of the interaction between individual and group.

The Nintendo Wii provides an entirely more individualized and detached picture of society. Close observation of Wii users provide a source for interpretation of the current social and political environment. The lens of Laban Movement Analysis provides a framework for both phenomena at the movement level. In comparing the Wii to more overtly political forms of mass movement we gain the opportunity to critically examine an aspect of mediated culture and the body.

1-2:30 KEYNOTE ADDRESS


THIRD SESSION: 2:45-4:05 PM

Transational Performance and the Politics of Intimacy
Room #208
Moderator: Janet O’Shea (Professor, UCLA)

Souvnans: Embodied Remembrance A Memory Choreographed
Ann Mazzocca

Souvnans refers to a place but it also references an event – a mystical remembrance occurring annually in a weeklong ritual of Vodou ceremonies at the lakou (family compound typical of the Haitian countryside) of the same name in the Artibonite Valley of Gonaives, Haiti. Souvenance Mystique, which is painted atop the front of the central house of worship or peristil translates as mystical remembrance and honors the lwa, the deities or spirits of Vodou that came from the traditions of Dahomey, which is now Benin, West Africa. Souvnans is a site of embodied practices referencing history and building community through sacred song, dance, rhythm, and ritual. My experience there for five days last March left a lasting impression on me, and the residue of that experience remains, just as the dances, rhythms, songs, and rituals of Souvnans remain and are repeated every year.

My video project was driven by my intention to portray the intimacies present in my experience at Souvnans. I was struck by the intimacy between the Vodou practitioners as well as the fervor expressed in their spiritual practices and beliefs. My experience within the choreographed intimacy of bodies practicing Vodou as well as my everyday intimate experiences with the landscape and people motivated the film. I carry the memory traces of the embodied enactments at Souvnans with me and have choreographed them into a ten-minute digital memory that seeks to expose the politics of intimacy and difference within my experience.


Ritualization of Transnational Identities: Narratives of Ritual and Performance in Indian Sanskrit Dance-Theater
Elizabeth Kurien (UCR)

This paper explores certain ethnographic/anthropological writings of Kutiyattam (Indian Sanskrit ritual-dance-theater), which focus on ritual by Western and Western-influenced discourse, as a discursive tool for negotiations of transnational identity- both in discourses of “othering” and its (ritual’s) re-appropriation by indigenous and Indian nationalistic discourses- to argue for “cultural uniqueness” in the current context of global capital and transnational culture. Some of the questions I ask en-route are how has ritual come to be manipulated by the state (in terms of Tourism) to further economic interests? What does an over-focus on ritual and religion in the global world signify? I argue that the ritual of knowledge-making or the way in which historical discourse is mapped might be symptomatic of the ways in which “multiculturalism” and its attend forms of covert and overt racism operates in transnationalism. Yet, depending on how discourses of multicultural performances are imbued with new meanings and possibilities in transnational discourses, I try to imagine a space (miniscule as it might be) where discourses of performance might offer a platform to bridge the perceived gap between text and performance (written text and embodied text), (public) discourse and (private) lived experience.

Yed Ped Fuck the Duck
Waewdao Srisook (UCLA)

This choreography is created to take ownership of the self. The piece is inspired by the experience of a person (myself as a Lanna/Northern Thai female) who views, presents, and feels her self in her own body and culture. However, a viewer outside of my culture who receives the image of my body, my self, in movement and sound, may create their own vision of my identity. They may create an issue out of my body, thinking there should be a problem of cultural embodiment, of self-objectification. They may somehow want to get me involved in and into their appropriated concept of my self, an eroticized Asian female body in the Western gaze, for example.

Speaking from my direct experience and background, I was born with this body, I live with this body, I am this body. I have pride in this body and who I am. I do not feel guilt on my own terms nor should I be made to feel guilt and shame by others because of their political agenda or over-imagination of what my non-objectified body should mean.

This performance deconstructs and reconstructs my Lanna identity by presenting an absurdly-sexualized, two-dimensional image of my self, challenging the audience and their inherent political prejudices in visual and participatory ways to take apart and construct my dance, my identity, my being, in the moment. The piece uses text in original Lanna language with no English subtitles and is performed by an authentic Northern Thai body.


Just Non-do it!: The Alexander Technique and the Intercorporeal Conference Paper
Room #214
Sima Belmar (UC Berkeley) and Shelley Senter (UC Berkeley)

Foucault’s panopticon cramping your style? Feeling cursed by your Bourdieuian body hexis? Join us for a playful excursion across the theory-practice divide. This lecture-demonstration-workshop-performance-paper begins with a practicum in the Alexander Technique followed by a radical yet pain-free deconstruction of the conference paper format. Sima Belmar responds to Shelley Senter’s handiwork through a series of questions about the potentialities and limits of non-doing as theory, as method, and as move. Can the principle of non-doing produce intercorporeal moments between paper presenter and audience? Might inhibiting our habitual modes of presenting and receiving conference papers produce new knowledges, new ideas, new contact?


Alternative Transmissions
Room #101
Taisha Paggett (choreographer, founder and co-editor of itch magazine), Meg Wolfe (Showbox Productions, Anatomy Riot and Dance Bank.), Arianne Hoffman (MFA student, UCLA), Anna B. Scott (professor, UCR)
--- due to scheduling conflicts, Paggett and Wolfe might not be able to attend. ---
--- The conversation will be podcasted and twittered! ---

This roundtable discussion among choreographers and writers in the Los Angeles area who have been actively engaged in formulating alternative models/modes of communication and dialogue by, for, and about moving bodies explores recent artist-led initiatives dedicated to creating new avenues for critical discourse around modern and postmodern dance (such as itch dance journal, an earful of dance podcast, and Afrologics newsletter/blog) and the implications of such a discourse. Pertinent questions on which participants will focus the discussion include: Are these mediums envisioned as networks for connecting to geographically dispersed dance audiences or for delivering content? What is the value of having a clearly defined readership/listenership and what is at stake? Do these new possibilities for transmission initiate two-way interaction with an audience/readership? What interests and/or responsibilities do these mediums hold for creating either a local or global community? Do they seek to exist as a community service or an extension of one’s artistic or scholarly practice? What are the politics of solicitation versus open submission in generating content? How do they expand, re-situate, or re-contextualize the lens from which (local) dance is typically editorialized in mainstream outlets?


State of the Arts: National Identity and Personal Leadership in Dance Production
Room #153
Moderator: Jill Neunes Jensen (Professor, LMU)

Strange Bedfellows: Sleeping Beauty, Conservatism and the Monarchic Ideal
Betsy Miller

In 1890, Marius Petipa premiered The Sleeping Beauty at the Imperial Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. Three decades later, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes would present a remake of the same work on London’s Alhambra stage. The striking differences between Russia’s two premiere dance companies, and the vastly different cultural/political climates surrounding each production package each version of the work in different context, but the ballet remains essentially an emblem for monarchic idealism and cultural conservatism. This paper explores the history of The Sleeping Beauty through a cultural/political lens. I focus primarily on Diaghilev’s remake, The Sleeping Princess, and analyze factors (political, social and economic) that made the connoisseur of the avante garde turn to a classical reconstruction, with a particular focus on the ballet’s relationship to conservatism. The paper draws on the research of Lynn Garafola, Tim Scholl, Roland John Wiley and other scholars.


Politicking Aesthetics: Nationalism in Dance from the Eisenhower Fund to the NEA’s American Masterpieces
Asheley B. Smith (UCR)

What happens when the government becomes a patron of the arts? How does public funding influence dance aesthetics? This paper argues that the politics of nationalism are an integral part of the decision-making process that results in a grant from the government to a dance artist. Building off of Naima Prevot’s Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, I explore the choices made by the dance panel of Eisenhower’s Emergency Fund and how these decisions contributed to positioning the United States internationally during the Cold War and to defining an “American aesthetic.” The paper then turns to 2005 when the National Endowment for the Arts launched as a pilot program the American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius initiative. What is at stake when a piece of choreography is deemed to be an “American Masterpiece”? Following Mark Franko’s discussion in “Dance and the Political: States of Exception,” I suggest that when funding from the government is granted, choreography indeed enters the political sphere, willingly or unwillingly, and necessarily engages with a nationalist dialogue.

Leading and Facilitating Change in Systems—A View for Dance
Jane Alexandre (Antioch)

The art form of dance and the practice of leadership therein by artists who are socially engaged have characteristics and peculiarities which limit the usefulness of conventional systems theory in shedding light on their workings. At present, there is no existing body of scholarship on leadership in dance. There is research in other disciplines which can offer some insights into what questions might be asked to begin to construct theory for dance leadership: Randy Martin’s work on performance as political act: the embodied self; and Carol Becker’s consideration of the artist as public intellectual are examples. Integral theory offers a model which can place questions about how socially engaged dancers lead into a wide-reaching framework. This paper surveys relevant work in other disciplines; and then uses integral theory both to describe the complexity and intricacies of dance leadership, and to set out issues facing dance researchers.
The paper is rooted in the understanding that leadership in dance lies solely with the artist or artists, rather than with managers or organizations. It is written from the viewpoint of an individual artist of eclectic background including among other elements political science/peace studies and clinical nursing; a socially engaged dancer who is committed to the art form and to its power to both ease the human condition and provide opportunities for evolution.


FOURTH SESSION: 4:20-5:35 PM

Queerness, Humanness, and Anti-Normative Corporealities
Room #208
Moderator: Neil Greenberg (Professor, UC Riverside)

Tea with the architect
Tim Rubel (UCR)

I am currently choreographing an evening length dance inspired by the dramatic writings of 20th century absurdist playwright, Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994). Several of Ionesco’s works revolve around a character “Berenger” who speaks, acts and moves against what society dictates as acceptable. In Rhinoceros (1960) he rejects popular fascism and ends up alone in the world. In The Killer (1958), he refuses to succumb to the fear and isolation caused by a mass murderer. Continuing with this theme I use Berenger’s resistance to open up doors for a queer reading on both Berenger and the writing of Ionesco, one of modernity’s most influential artists.

In this 12-minute section of my all male dance inspired by The Killer, Berenger is presented as a gay male modern dancer who rejects a heteronormative choreographic structure that disciplines and “kills” his queer gesticulations. Eventually, he is able to break out of the structure and arrive at a new metaphysical (possibly utopist) location where his queerness is not disciplined, but revered.

Out of Balance: The Politics of the Human and the Humanly Unthinkable in Dance and Live Art Methodology.
Doran George (UCLA)

By chronicling the development of a dance practice by British based artist Kira O' Reilly as a critical formal maneuver, this paper articulates the regulation of corporeal intelligibility through the discrete disciplinary discourses of Dance and Live art. Working from the assumption that cultural production involving the body entails constructing what it means to be human as an irrevocably political affair establishes the politics of form and therefore why the 'how' as much as the 'what' is being said remains a vital locus of activism. O'Reilly's movement work Untitled (Syncope), made initially for the 2007 London "Spill Festival" of new performance, exposes deep disciplinary chauvinism still at play in Dance and Live Art as it places in critical relief the rigidity of formal conventions even as a celebration of the interdisciplinary moment seems superannuated. Both disciplines are built around contrasting canonizations of bodily intelligibility entrenched isn their respective methodologies which a close read of O'Reilly's praxis is seen to both reveal and upset. The effort entailed in building methodological conventions as a hybridization of discrete disciplinary concerns is traced across approaches and genealogies historically situated in London and New York. The work O'Reilly makes is configured as corporeal re-signification made possible through a radical re-framing of mastery. This has significance for the production and reception of contemporary work with an ostensibly political agenda, because the space opened up for the construction of 'human' out of 'humanly unthinkable' in Untitled (Syncope) highlights the political exigencies of subject formation located in form.

Survival: Concepts, Choreography, Queerness
Tania Hammidi (UCR)

“Living after,” in the words of Jacques Derrida, poses a particular set of conceptual and logistic problems for those who survive the deaths of their friends. Derrida’s Work of Mourning (2001) and Last Interview (2007) both establish absence (of the body; of the subject; of those who are no longer here) as his primary theoretical conundrum and as the site where his politics are conceived. Following Derrida, in “Survival: Concepts, Choreography, Queerness” I look at the work of transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey, who’s 2009 full-length concert Uncovered: The Diary Project offers eight stories about retrieving absent bodies and heroic political figures through archival research, and restaging it on the dance floor. Dorsey’s attention to the female-to-male writer Lou Sullivan (who died in 1991 of AIDS-related complications) in Uncovered documents Sullivan’s body as a political body, one whose physical absence results in not the erasure or “collapse” of time and space, but rather in a maintenance of “absence” in the present, through the integration of death into his narrative. Dorsey’s techniques are characteristic of post-modern dance and choreography: Uncovered weaves together spoken word, narrative voice-over, set design, and modern dance as elements of a complex story about time, history, and gravity. Yet it is Dorsey’s homo-social narrative – his love for Lou Sullivan and for collective notions of trans belonging and for queer dance, made into the felt material of his work – that finally links choreography to a political project of surviving, of living beyond, and “living after.”


Choreographies of Loss & Expendable Bodies of Capital
Room #101
Moderator: Yvonne Hardt (Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley)

This panel brings together the work of three scholars of transnational performance, dance, and feminist studies who investigate the politics of embodiment and the choreographies of global markets, war, and state-making practices of terror. While the papers are sited within divergent locations—the soybean fields of northern Argentina, the streets of Chilean cities, and the theatrical stage—they theoretically radiate outward to map transnational affective economies and configurations of power relative to the valuation/devaluation of bodies (living and/or dead). Panel participants—Marcela Fuentes, Tamara Spira, and Sara Wolf similarly engage choreography as a meta-process as well as an analytic lens to better understand these economies and configurations and, additionally, to highlight the important labor of embodied activist performance and bodies in motion.

Los Pasos: Steps Towards a Human Ecology of Transnational Capital
Marcela Fuentes (UCLA)

This paper addresses the issue of available labor, exploitation, and disposable bodies through the case of “los pibes bandera,” teenagers who are hired to function as human markers in the soy fields of north Argentina and who consequently are sprayed by the aerial fumigation of the crop duster airplanes they guide. I use choreographic analysis to map these bodies in relation to the fields where they perform their tasks with a precision ordered by those who profit from the “white gold” fever of soybean cultivation. What operations do we make room for when we use choreography as an analytical tool? What can choreography offer, not only as a frame to make visible a practice that escapes local and global attention but also as a tool to call forth a new ordering of these vulnerable bodies within transnational capital? In using choreography both analytically and speculatively, my aim is to mobilize a new set of parameters for bodies in space that could be used as a way out of this situation. That is, as a labor of undoing where these available bodies become agents of their own inscription.

Remembering Trauma in a Time of War: The Affective Economies of Neoliberal Amnesia and the Radical Imagination of Dissent
Tamara Spira (UC Santa Cruz)

In the wake of nearly three decades of brutal dictatorship, memory has emerged as a highly emotional and fraught category of political contestation in Chile. Since the demise of (formal) dictatorship, there has been an explosion of tense debates surrounding how one should or should not memorialize the coup and subsequent years of torture, exile, and bloodshed. As a glimmering market tantalizes all with promises of short-lived pleasures, a political order founded in consensus and impunity encourages amnesia and silence over a serious engagement with the past. Accordingly, a series of difficult questions surrounding the political and ethical imperatives of remembering mass violence are raised: How is one to commemorate the disappeared lives of loved ones whose bodies still remain un-recovered? In this paper, I explore activist aesthetics that take up this question by examining the Funa protest movement inaugurated by the children of the disappeared, who stage highly confrontational public actions to out and shame war criminals. Mobilizing through the streets with photos of their deceased parents, this performative movement plays with aesthetics, form, and recognition in order to de-normalize the conditions of loss that provoked their emergence. Through their performative enactment of memory and (re)embodiment, they intervene in affective economies of neoliberal amnesia and despair.

Choreographing the Bomb: Corporeal Dissonance in William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies
Sara Wolf (UCLA)

In his 2007 anti-Iraq War dance Three Atmospheric Studies, William Forsythe choreographs the human cost and psychic fallout of a bomb explosion in a Baghdad market, a split-second event captured in a newspaper photograph that he transforms into an evening-length interrogation on the devaluation of human life and the limits of visual imagery and language to represent the event and its aftermath. Given the nature of the focus of Three Atmospheric Studies, the question arises as to what an art form based on the articulation of highly capable, physically present bodies can communicate about the destruction of bodily coherence. To answer this, I examine Forsythe’s use of the physics of sound and explosives to choreograph corporeal dissonance and dissolution. In so doing, I contend that Forsythe argues for the labor of dancing bodies and postmodern abstraction to produce an alternate epistemology of loss within the saturated global media sphere.


Labour with a “U:” Choreographing Contexts and Performing Nationalisms
Room #153
Moderator: Anthea Kraut (Professor, UC Riverside)

The aim of this panel is to put into dialogue questions of the body, labor and national and racial identities that arise in Canadian and Cuban contexts. Taken together these papers suggest the importance of opening up American academic discourses on race to include discussions of processes of racialization outside of a US frame of reference. In so doing, the panel will address visual economies of race and multiculturalism, as well as the ways in which dance constructs “belonging.” Here, we investigate bodily labors, thus emphasizing the work that bodies do in producing the national subject. Furthermore, we are interested in revealing moments of slippage as bodies and their labors slide in and out of national and cultural discourses of authenticity. Methodologically, these papers approach the discourses of labor and citizenship through diverse means including ethnography, critical readings of cultural representations, and historically-minded analyses of the politics of producing performance.

Waltzing with the Log Driver: Dance, Labor and the Canadian Body
Laura D. Vriend (UCR)

This paper examines the Canadian animated short film entitled Log Driver’s Waltz. This cartoon, part of a series called Canada Vignettes produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), was screened before feature length films and also aired throughout the 1980s on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). While this cartoon has varied implications for the ways in which it simultaneously constructs and represents Canadian identity while intersecting with national policies on multiculturalism and nationally mandated roles of cultural industries in Canada, this paper focuses on how this cartoon positions the log driver as both a laboring and a dancing body. This paper asks and explores why in the late 70s ad 80s it became important to bring forth this particular laboring body in the cultural production of a Canadian national identity and attempts to unpack how the nation is being constructed and represented in this specific cultural formation. Furthermore, I explore the purpose of aligning this laboring body with a dancing body, how dance is labor (or not), and why this laboring body also appears as a dancing body in this case. Through a discussion of the preceding issues I posit that the body produced discursively in the Log Driver’s Waltz becomes a doubly laboring body working to construct Canada in ways specifically linked to the nation’s desire to define an authentic and exceptional Canadian body. Ultimately, this analysis draws attention to the theoretical potentialities that arise at the junctures of dancing and laboring.

Pas-de-Deux: Nationalism and Racism on the Montreal Stage
Melissa Templeton (UCR)

The preservation of the French language is a major concern in Québec, and accordingly, the funding of artistic production in Montreal is closely tied to a nationalist discourse that rewards cultural projects promoting “French” culture. When this is related to dance, the issue becomes all the more complicated. Since most dance performances occur outside of a linguistic framework (with some exceptions of course), the question of culture rests on the identity of these dancing bodies: who looks as though they are promoting Québécois culture, and who looks Québécois. As symbol of national identity, dance relies on moving bodies to project its image, often leading to implicit conclusions about a culture based on bodily characteristics, and in particular, assumptions based on race. Québec identity is closely tied to images of white dancing bodies and hence, provincial funding for the Montreal dance community has exhibited an implicit preference for European derived dance forms. While francophone immigration is encouraged in Québec, the enthusiasm for “other” francophone cultures seems to halt at language. I believe it is for this reason that francophone choreographers like Eddy Toussaint and Zab Maboungou have had significant difficulty gaining recognition as valuable artists within the dance community. My proposed discussion “Pas-de-Deux: Nationalism and Racism on the Montreal Stage” will investigate a pattern of Eurocentrism in Montreal’s dance community. As illustrated in the lack of government funding for Toussaint’s Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal and the slow recognition of Zab Maboungou as a prominent choreographer, Montreal dance audiences have tended to equate non-white dance as “non-Québécois.”

Soy Cubana Negra?: An investigation of my performance of Cubanness.
Adanna Jones (UCR)

In this paper, I use an autoethnographic approach to focus on how my body labored in Cuba. At the base of this focus is the question of citizenship, both cultural and legal. With body labor as a framework and citizenship as a lens, issues of race, gender, class, and insider-/outsider-ness evince to the surface. The fact remains that my encounter with, as well as my embodiment, and thus construction of la Cubana negra {the black Cuban woman} remains entangled and interwoven into these aforementioned discourses – which are always already in play. Within this paper, I am driven by three main questions: 1. What discourses was I participating in as la Cubana negra? 2. How did I/my body labor as la Cubana negra? and 3. Looking at the moments of slippage, which refers to the moments where I dis-engaged/-identified with la Cubana negra, what were the implications and limitations of my embodied performance of la Cubana negra. I first identify myself as a world citizen, which creates a space for analyzing my affinity to and for la Cubana negra. Next, I investigate la Cubana negra as a discourse – as to reveal how la Cubana negra enabled, constrained, and constituted me. Ultimately, as I participate in the discourse of la Cubana negra, I expose the moments of slippage out of the la Cubana negra discourse, for it is at these moments that issues of race, gender, class, and insider-/outsider-ness come into question.


OUT OF STUDIO PERFORMANCE 5:40-6 PM

Suspend. Now, Await.
Lobby
Ally Voye and IN/EX Dance Project

Over the past year, I found myself waiting to vote, waiting for other people to vote, waiting to hear results of polls, studies, hearings and demonstrations, waiting to hear back from fellow activists, and even waiting for someone else to do something about it all. Now here, at the beginning of 2009, I find myself maintaining a sense of activism, yet also waiting for our new administration to “change things”. For Dance Under Construction, I am proposing a piece that explores the conflicts between power, activism, and simply waiting. Where do these two ideas meet? How can an individual balance both? Where do hope and hopelessness collide?

This work was inspired by the past year and the overwhelming sense of helplessness and endless waiting that consumed the nation as we faced a variety of challenges and changes. From the economy, and the possibilities of a new president, to global warming and continued concern over the conflicts overseas, how can an individual feel powerful in comparison to such vast issues? Individual action has its effect, but individuals must also WAIT, regardless of the cause.

A trio of people waits in line, slowly and endlessly traveling through its curves and loops. As time passes, the waiting dulls them into daydreaming about the end of the wait, yet simultaneously yanks them back to the frustrating reality of their situation. Sometimes the end is within sight; sometimes it is incredibly distant, yet as these variables change, the subjects find themselves constantly and endlessly advancing in line, possibly never really getting what they are waiting for.

Suspend. Now, Await is meant to be performed in a variety of non-proscenium spaces. It might work well as a transitional performance between panels in the large lobby area upon entering the building, or in the gallery/lobby area to the south of 200. My long-term plan for the work is to create both spontaneous and planned, publicized performances of the piece in busy, diverse landmarks throughout Los Angeles, documenting not only the performance but how the audience’s involvement changes the work in each location.

RECEPTION 6-7 PM