News & Events – Critical Dance Studies

Fall 2024 Events

http://Dance%20and%20the%20Visual%20Artist

Dance and the Visual Artist

Wednesday, October 9

5 to 7

at the SLIPPAGE Lab

Zac Whittenburg, Chicago dance writer, moderates a conversation between Brendan Fernandes and bree gant, faculty and MFA student in Art, Theory & Practice

Embodied Meaning: a workshop in Expressive Performance

Saturday and Sunday

October 12-13 @ 10-4 pm

Links Hall, Chicago

$250

Alexandra Beller is hosting a 2-day workshop at Links Hall in mid-October on using Laban and Bartenieff, specifically Laban’s Effort material, for expressive communication in both speaking and moving.

This event is not hosted by the cluster, but is highly recommended by several cluster participants. For more information and to register, visit https://www.alexandrabellerdances.org/embodiedmeaningchi

CDSWG: “Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe”

Tuesday, October 22

5:30 to 7

at the Museum of Contemporary Art

The Chicago Dance Studies Working Group will host a conversation on Juliet Bellow and Nell Andrew’s essay “Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe.”

Visit the Chicago Dance Studies Working Group website here for access to readings.

Dance in the City: Streets, Stages, and Nightclubs

Monday, November 11

5 to 7PM

at SLIPPAGE Lab

A talk by Aishika Chakraborty

Once upon a time, the Black Town of nineteenth century Calcutta staged a richly speckled urban-popular-folk culture in its mehfil and bazar when trans-local dancers like bai, jhumur,
kobi and khyamta vied with each other for patronage of white masters and brown sahibs. At one and the same time, the White Town of the second city of the empire, hosted cabaret nights with itinerant exotic dancers as part of its nighttime pleasure. This paper will explore how erotic dancing bodies thrived through different economies in different nights despite the sudden changes of fortune suffered from the two world war(s), blackouts, famine,
independence and the partition (1947).

Moving forward in postcolonial times, the paper captures the shifts in space, style and clientele when the colonial club-culture gave way to the ‘vulgar’ (sub) culture of a plebeian nightlife. If old nightclubs sported cabaret nights with light-skinned bodies, the city’s Northern neighborhood started staging cabaret/porn theatres with a new rank of refugees, migrants and squatters. Not surprisingly, the state took a crack at the nightclubs in order to wipe out the underclass erotic bodies from Calcutta’s moral geography.

Did such erasures remove old threats altogether? If the creation of the moral nation mandated the expurgation of obscene dancers from its glorious inventory, it must also archive the
histories of such erasure. Bringing under focus the absent and provocative bodies of the dancing city, this paper returns to the lost stories of Calcutta’s night-dancers to write them
back into history.

About the Speaker:

Aishika Chakraborty is Professor and Director of the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, India. Her research straddles gender history, dance history and feminist performance. Her book, Widows of Colonial Bengal: Gender, Morality and Cultural
Representation (2023) is awarded the Hiralal Gupta Research Award for the Best Book by a Woman Historian in the Indian History Congress, 2023. A bi-lingual author, Aishika has authored two books on the changing faces of modern-contemporary dance of Calcutta, Kolkatar Nach: Samakaleen Nagarnritya (2019) and Kolkatar Cabaret: Bangali, Younata Ebang Miss Shefali (2020). Her forthcoming edited volumes are The Dancing Body: Labour, Livelihood and Leisure (with Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Routledge, 2024) and Gendered Bodies, Social Exclusions: Contemporary Issues in Women’s Studies (with Nandita Banerjee Dhawan, Routledge 2025).
Aishika was a dancer-choreographer of Calcutta’s leading feminist contemporary dance institute, Dancers’ Guild.

CDSWG: “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction”

Tuesday, December 3

5:30 to 7

at the Museum of Contemporary Art

The Chicago Dance Studies Working Group will host a conversation on David Getsy’s essay “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction”.

Visit the Chicago Dance Studies Working Group website here for access to readings.

ANTARANGA: Between You and Me

Friday, December 6

7PM Performance by Ananya Dance Theatre

8:30PM Drinks on the Cluster!

at Links Hall

ANTARANGA: Between You and Me is set in a world in deep crisis (much like our own) where most people have lost their ability to sense the energy of other human beings and can no longer recognize or connect with each other. A few humsafar (Urdu for “fellow travelers”) remain, blessed with super-connecting and heart-opening powers. As they undertake perilous journeys, they forge connectivities that may yet heal the world. ANTARANGA is the first work in a duology, and explores themes of intimacy, connection, trust, and community among BIPOC women/femmes.

Click here to purchase tickets, starting at $16!

Winter 2025 Events

Moving Alternatives

Thursday, February 13

7:30PM

at Museum of Contemporary Art

Performance outing to see Anna Collod’s Moving Alternatives, a reperformance of material from Denishawn.

CDSWG: "Does Abstraction Belong to White People?"

Tuesday, March 4

5:30 to 7PM

at the Museum of Contemporary Art

The Chicago Dance Studies Working Group will host a conversation with Rafael Palacios on Miguel Gutierrez’s essay “Does Abstraction Belong to White People?”

http://Reworking%20the%20Ballet%20La%20Bayadere

Reworking the Ballet La Bayadere

Thursday, March 13

5 to 7PM

Location TBD on Evanston Campus

Guest speaker Priya Srinivasan will give a performative lecture on her dramaturgy incorporating a 1838 visit of Indian dancers to Paris on revised staging of La Bayadere. Madison Mainwarring will respond and facilitate a post-talk discussion.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies.

Workshop with Rafael Palacios

January TBD

Location TBD on Evanston Campus

A workshop with Rafael Palacios on Sankofa Danzafro.

http://Workshop%20with%20Rafael%20Palacios

Spring 2025 Events

CDSWG: “Blackness in Abstraction”

Tuesday, April 8

5:30 to 7PM

at the Museum of Contemporary Art

The Chicago Dance Studies Working Group will host a conversation on Adrienne Edwards’ essay “Blackness in Abstraction”

Curating Ailey

Wednesday, April 23

5:30 to 7PM

at Wirtz downtown, in Abbott Hall

Adrienne Edwards will give a lecture on “Curating Ailey”.

This event is co-sponsored by Art, Theory, and Practice and the Black Arts Consortium.

The Other Witch

May TBD

Location TBD on Evanston campus

Nejla Yatkin presents screen version of her dance The Other Witch, a reperformance of Wigman’s Witch Dance.

CDSWG: "Wrapping Up and Futuring"

Tuesday, May 27

5:30 to 7PM

at the Museum of Contemporary Art

The Chicago Dance Studies Working Group will host a social event to wrap up the year and plan for the subsequent year of Chicago Dance Studies Working Group.

http://Graduate%20Student%20Presentations

Graduate Student Presentations

June TBD

Location TBD on Evanston campus

Students that are currently active in the cluster are invited to give reserach presentations as a dress rehearsal for sharing work at the Dance Studies Association’s annual conference, taking place on June 25-29 in Washington DC.

2024 Spring Events

Susan Ravn: Kinesthetia 'in action'

Wednesday, April 5 at 5PM

Slippage Lab, Louis Hall

Kinesthesia ‘in action’: a critically loaded phenomenological approach for analyzing the dynamic qualities of movement

Dance scholars have acknowledged the ways in which qualitative dynamics of movement are recognized, felt, and valued differently depending upon the ideals, techniques, and traditions of the dance practice. In somatic practices such as the Alexander and Klein techniques, participants’ feelings of movement dynamic are configured in close alliance with interoceptive sensations and imaginary work. With these scholarly works as point of departures, Ravn argues that dancers’ and somatic practitioners’ ways of turning to and engaging feelings of movement’s dynamic facilitate phenomenological descriptions of how kinesthesia can be deployed in skilled practices. Ravn considers the sense in which dancers’ feeling of the dynamic qualities of movement or their feeling of movement’s flux is preconfigured in subtle ways due to enculturation, deliberate cultivation, and the specificities of practice. The possibility of a pre-reflective (non-reifying) performative-oriented mode of being aware of one’s body is discussed to account for how kinesthesia can be in use, and thereby ‘in action’, in specialized and skilled ways.

Halifu Osumare

Guest Talk by Halifu Osumare

April 23 at TBD

Black Arts Consortium Conference Room, Downtown Campus

Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria

Monday, May 6 at 12:30PM

Kresge Hall

Lunch will be served at this event. Dabke, one of Syria’s most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country’s war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, Shayna Silverstein shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. Her book situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria’s recent (and ongoing) turmoil.

Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor in the Department of Performance Studies and faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Her teaching and scholarship broadly examines the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary SWANA/Middle Eastern cultural production.

Sponsored by Middle East and North African Studies Program. Part of MENA Mondays!

Amanda Reid

Guest Talk with Amanda Reid

May 7-8

More information coming soon!

2024 Winter Quarter Events

Vivir Sabroso: Choreographies of Living in the Colombian Pacific

Works-in-Progress Series Talk by Prof. Melissa Blanco Borelli

This talk engages with critical dance studies, performance studies and Black studies to think about how theatre, dance, and archival memory projects reflect Afro-Colombian political and poetic philosophies of the everyday.

January 31st at 12pm

Northwestern Library, Room 3266