Current Writing Projects
“The Dance-tech Project: How Like a Network.” Second author.
Chapter on the history of Marlon Barrios Solano’s dance-tech projects (including Meta-Academy) in book Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance Edited by M.A. (Maaike) Bleeker. Routledge. 2016.
Short Abstract: Since October 2007, the dance-tech project has explored the affordances of the bottom-up architectures of the internet and web 2.0 technologies for collaborative knowledge production and creative expression by body-based artistic practitioners working at the intersection of dance, performance, new media, architecture, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology and science. This chapter traces the development of the project and the philosophy that informs it.
“Creative Action and Knowledge Production in Live Performance.” Co-author.
This is a working title for a case study paper co-written with Annie Kloppenberg. We presented our ideas at the 2014 World Dance Alliance Global Summit and are now formalizing them into a paper.
Short Abstract: Following paradigms put forth by performance theorists Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut (2009) and sociologist Hans Joas (1996), and using concrete examples from our work in the collaborative performance Avalanche, this paper responds to Butterworth and Wildschut’s proposal: “In what ways is it possible to perceive choreographic processes and products as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’, ‘being’, and ‘interpreting’?”(5)
Selected Recent Conference Presentations and Invitational Speaking Engagements:
- Idocde 2015: Teaching Formlessness. Vienna, Austria.
“Foreword/Afterword: How to Make This Dance.” Workshop. Co-taught with Annie Kloppenberg and Meredith Lyons. July 26, 2015.
Abstract: Foreward/Afterword is a performance, workshop, and research platform; a piece in two parts, method, and exercise in collaborative authorship. The template creates a shared physical language sourced from the embodied logics and aesthetic—and especially from the liminal spaces between those allegiances—then it activates choreographic choice, and raises fundamental questions about physical logic and what makes a dance.
- “Cut and Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity” Society of Dance History Scholars/Congress on Research in Dance. Athens, Greece.
“Foreword/Afterword: How to Make This Dance.” Workshop. Co-taught with Annie Kloppenberg and Meredith Lyons. June 5, 2015.
Abstract: Foreword/Afterword is a performance, a workshop, and a research platform. The score invites three performers to silently collaborate to create a movement phrase in front of an audience, then the performers attempt to create a “really good” dance work in a short period of time from the phrase material. The score creates a shared physical language sourced from embodied logics and aesthetics, then it activates choreographic choice, and raises fundamental questions about physical logic, authorship, and what makes a good dance.
- World Dance Alliance Global Summit: Contemporising the Past, Envisaging the Future. Angers France.
“Avalanche: A Case Study in Creative Action as Research.” Co-author. Case study paper co-written with Annie Kloppenberg. July 11 2014.
Abstract: Following paradigms put forth by performance theorists Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut (2009) and sociologist Hans Joas (1996), and using concrete examples from our work in Avalanche, a collaborative creative research project, this paper responds to Butterworth and Wildschut’s proposal: “In what ways is it possible to perceive choreographic processes and products as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’, ‘being’, and ‘interpreting’?”(5). Joas proposes three models for understanding human creativity, classifying expression as subjective, rooted in the actor’s experience; production as objective and material; and revolution as the potential of a product to affect the social order (71). Avalanche, which premiered at the 2012 SDHS conference, addresses each of Joas’ models. Proposed, curated, and enacted by an intergenerational and interdisciplinary cast of artist-educators, this project concerned both pedagogy and performance. But several dialectics emerged that sculpted the research process as one that centered on instability–in the context of shifting hierarchies based on artistic and academic relationships and in the interaction of proficiency and uncertainty. The research team found itself drawing upon embodied skill sets from the theater and dance cannons; simultaneously engaging traditional and emergent compositional methodologies; performing hyperpersonal subject matter in a sometimes cool performance mode; diving in and out of the personal in the process with occasionally unwilling intimacy; weaving together improvisation and set material in performance; and linking narrative and abstract representational strategies. Avalanche both reflects and articulates current trends and provides a tangible opportunity to examine contemporary performance as research.
- picTr Brownbag Lunch Series. Bates College. Lewiston, Maine.
Meta-Academy: Strategies for Online Co-creativity. December 2, 2013.
- Motion-Bank Live and Online 2013. Frankfurt, Germany.
Meta-Academy. Invitational Presentation with Marlon Barrios Solano. November 28-December 1 2013.
- Eighth International Conference on the Arts in Society. Budapest, Hungary.
Artists in Residence: Two Models. Co-presentation Roundtable with Dr. Katalin Vecsey. June 24, 2013.
- Society of Dance History Scholars. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Avalanche. Performance presentation. June 2012.
- Bates College Common Lecture Series: Race in a Posthuman World. Lewiston, Maine. |
Posthumanism In the Very Eye of the Night. Performance and discussion. May 15, 2011.
- Sixth International Conference on the Arts in Society. Berlin, Germany.
H’Edge: within/without Nature. Socially Engaged Dance-Ecology Collaboration in Higher Education. May 11, 2011.
Journalistic Writing:
The First Pilot for Meta-Academy Brings the Jam Online. Bates Dance Festival Artists Blog. 18 October 2013. Link: http://www.batesdancefestival.org/the-first-pilot-for-meta-academy-brings-the-jam-online/
Rachel Boggia 