Creative Practice Showcase
Enmei or Long Life: A Dance and Aging Project
Creative Practice Showcase Eileen Standley, Mary Fitzgerald
Enmei, roughly translates to "long life" in Japanese. This interdisciplinary performance project was inspired by a desire to challenge some of the existing notions about aging and the female body - both within the contemporary dance world and the larger culture. Our research explores what it means and what it takes to continue dancing as older women, and how this differs between American and Japanese cultures, in particular. Mid- to late-career dance artists and scholars from the U.S. and Japan brought their varied life – and bodily -- experiences together to explore how cultural ideas about aging and gender inform the lives and embodied experiences of female dancers (and, by extension, of non- dancers). For this Creative Practice Showcase we will share photo, video and audio documentation of the research process, as well as short movement research demonstrations to unpack our discoveries about ageist practices, and consider how this particular work has the potential to catalyze social change.
Third Skin: The Borderless Surface of Migrants' Creative Resistance
Creative Practice Showcase Minah Lee
This essay is a love letter to the contemporary migrants whose mobilities are stigmatized by nation-states. Mobilities that threaten national borders posed by refugees, the movement of capital, and advanced technology, aggravate state violence manifested in surveillance. These same mobilities, in the realm of culture, reinforce global citizens’ desire for a transnational sensibility, which I model as Third Skin. This method for embodying border-crossing experiences draws upon theories investigating the intersections of art, politics, and senses. This sensory journey is demonstrated with three art works: visual artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ multimedia sculpture The Gates of Hell(2004); Lee Su-Feh’s ritualistic dance of remembrance The Things I Carry(2016); Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro’s performance memorial to the lost indigenous cultures After Sundance(2015). The process of witnessing these artworks is articulated by the writer, a migrant body straddling two far apart places: Seoul, Korea and unceded Coast Salish Territories, now called Vancouver, Canada. Third Skin tangiblizes the weight of our interrelations in globalization as creative resistance.
Fortnight Sessions: Examining Community Dynamics through Drawing
Creative Practice Showcase Paul Collins
After 30 years as a studio artist I’ve turned away from the studio in favor of on-site examinations of place and community through the act of drawing. I think of the process as slow interactive journalism: I’m trying to flesh out a broad portrait of the community connectedness through these immersive episodes. For each project I spend 14 days drawing in public at sites chosen by their suitability to examine issues of history, politics, or ecology in relation to my community. Project locations of the last year have included a family farm, my local gas station, Nashville’s downtown General Sessions courtrooms, a park endangered by development, a public radio station, an underground concert venue, and polling stations across northern Alabama during the Dec 12 U.S. Special Senate election. The technology changes(ink, pencil, marker, iPad, paint) depending on individual project restrictions, but the method is consistent: looking and listening and working to grasp the totality of the living scene. For this session, I propose to present samples of the methods and results of these projects in order to give an overview of this method of integrating drawing and social practice.
