the sins of such wonderful flesh: Installation, Artist Talk, and Creative Workshop

 

Cynthia Ling Lee and Shyamala Moorty offer a combined artist talk, interactive installation, and creative workshop on the sins of such wonderful flesh, a performance work by the Post Natyam Collective that weaves together audience participatory structures, video, and South Asian abhinaya to queer the gaze, performing erotically charged desire between women. The work is inspired by Maud Allan, a white, non-heterosexual, female, North American dance artist who toured her “Oriental” dances in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Using a queer and feminist-of-color lens, the artists will explore how choreographic subversions and ritual structures can be used to take on a dance-ancestor who perpetuated problematic structures of orientalism and internalized homophobia. The workshop participants will work with archival traces of Maud Allan such as publicity photos and reviews of her performance, Vision of Salome, to ask: How might we flip or blur the roles of “spectator” and “performer” through strategic activation of the audience? How might deep rootedness in South Asian performance aesthetics disturb or cut against the grain of Orientalist appropriation and exotification in Allan’s work?

October 16, 2019
Wednesday, 4:30-6:20 PM
Performance Lab, ARTS 166
Free and open to the campus.

New Research in Dance Studies Colloquium Series: Ritual / Power / Corpo-Realities

The generative and volatile relationships between embodied action, politics, and world-making are explored in this colloquium series that highlights new research in critical dance studies. At the same time, the series attends to the transdisciplinary reach of the field and its concerns by inviting scholars and artists from dance and other practices and fields, including those who are based locally and beyond. Finally, a main goal of this series is to explore the theory-making that happens through scholarship, writing, and dialogue as well as that which happens through other facilities of the body.

Coordinated by María Regina Firmino-Castillo; Assistant Professor, Critical Dance Studies