I presented a paper entitled “Decolonizing a ‘Contemporary’ Technique Curriculum?” at the CORD/SDHS Conference at Pomona College, Pomona CA, from November 3-6, 2016.  The paper was part of an organized panel with Ana Paula Hofling and Katya Wesolowski entitled “Dancing the “self” and the “other”: tradition, authority, and alterity in university dance curricula.”  My paper engages with the challenges of building a university dance technique curriculum around the contested idea of “contemporary” dance, using my experience teaching hybrid kathak-release technique courses in US higher educational settings as a springboard for deeper discussion.  The paper addresses the shifting, contradictory usages of the term “contemporary” in the field of dance and asks how intercultural critiques of modern/postmodern dance histories might reframe how we conceptualize technical training.  Is it possible to create a cumulative technique curriculum that honors hybrid histories and dance vocabularies?  What would it mean to desegregate stylistic training and to decolonize our teaching of “contemporary” dance by unsettling its Eurocentric associations with “innovation,” “technique,” and unmarked whiteness?

This year’s CORD/SDHS Conference is entitled Beyond Authenticity and Appropriation: Bodies, Authorship, and Choreographies of Transmission.
http://www.sdhscordconference.org/