Transformative Movement
Using Dance as a Language in the Architecture of Social Justice Education: Awareness and Advocacy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Carroll
In 2010, University of South Florida Dance Professor Andrew Carroll was approached by The Florida Department of Health to develop a dance video intended to be utilized as a new vehicle to depict correct procedures of effectively cleaning a hospital room. This initial creative research project served as a starting point of using dance as a language to educate on medical and social issues. This project was administered to The FDOH and led to two additional commissions. The video additionally was used by hospital systems nationally who were eager to explore the idea of using the arts to lend interest to relevant medical educational cleaning initiatives. This springboard creative research project served as a spin off point to use this medium to create videos using dance and the arts to educate and create awareness for the social justice issues of bullying, dating violence, suicide awareness, human sex-trafficking, and cyberbullying. The videos were implemented to organizations worldwide who advocate on these issues and were lauded for their ability to capture and engage interest, as well as providing a conduit for discussions of the respective subject matters. Many of the organizations have requested future work in this medium, laying a foundation attesting to the strength of the arts to intersect with society for a greater good. The presentation will highlight the creative aspects of these projects and the outcomes which ensued.
The Sovereign Experience of the Performing Artist
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session William Buse
In 2009 the author was charged with the task of constructing a counseling service for the aspiring artists at the Juilliard School in New York City. This task required a confrontation with an ethos particular and pervasive to this institution, that is, the sovereign - an absolute experience that implicitly shapes and authorizes the life of the artists and the counselors in the school. The author links this psychological, sovereign experience of the artist with the anthropologically-framed sacrificial offering of the scapegoat, a highly sanctioned loss that serves a socially affirming, organizing function for the school as well as society, today as in antiquity. This equivalence of artistic production and human expenditure is based on the work of French social theorist Georges Bataille and linked to the construction of a new philosophy for counseling the students within the school. The structural form of the fugue is adopted for this paper from the curriculum of the school to depict the collaborative interplay between the perspectives of three fields – anthropology, psychology, and the performing arts – as they constitute and influence the culture of The Juilliard School.
Social Practice Artwork and Alternative Performances: Gender and Alternative Pleasure Dynamics within the Social Dancing of Kizomba
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Collins
The teaching of Afro-Latin partner dance forms including Salsa, Bachata, Cha Cha Cha and Kizomba, routinely encourages participants to perform their gender within a rigid paradigm of heteronormative power-relations. Although many dancers are challenging the conventions of male-leading and female-following, through initiatives such as queer-tango and same-sex ballroom dance, there is virtually no evidence of social-dance role-reversal within mixed-sex couples ie. women leading men. This is a case study of a Role-Swap Kizomba course run in the city of Leeds in the UK, which aimed to challenge the twin taboos of men-following-women and women-leading-men in Afro-Latin social dance. To discover whether social dancers were open to dance-role reversal within a heterosexualised context. The course was constructed as both, a socially-engaged artwork and a social experiment. This study draws data from: questionnaires completed by dancers who attended the classes; ethnographic observation of the process and its outcomes; interviews with members of the larger Kizomba dancing community. The most significant results were the relative ease with which participants adapted to the new roles and the feelings of pleasure that many, particularly the men, reported from the experience. The paper also reports on follow-up experimentation with new approaches to shared leading which developed from the initial course.
Thinking Gestures in the Ecosphere
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Formis
Can a gesture think? How do we think about bodily movements? Could we hope to comprehend and understand better a problem through practice? Informed by practice-based research the Gesture Laboratory of the School of Arts at the Sorbonne university is exploring a performative workshop for art production and scientific research called Ecosphère: an ecosystem several levels interact with each other: matter, energy, human bodies and living things. The ecosphere of the Gesture Laboratory is a space of silence; gestures and bodies take precedence over words and invent other modes of communication and transmission. The ecosphere is a practice where a network of links is collectively woven, thought is generated around a major theme and from the elements brought by the participants. It is a situation of gestures and bodies, a context where speech is made tacit to capture the movement of ideas. The ecosphere is a space of coexistence where something beyond yourself is housed. It is a collective space. The ecosphere is a space where you are in a situation of listening, attention and response. It is a space of mutual respect, sympathy, neighbourhood, and relationship. The experimental "ecosphere" system provides a benevolent welcome to all singularities. Everyone takes their place according to who they are, and moves in an interactive network. Relationships are built in the form of gestures made in pairs or in groups. People who enter into a relationship are carried by movement, which eventually leaves a trace in space and dissociates itself from moving bodies.
