News & Events – Critical Dance Studies

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