Karen Harvey

What is culture? How can dance/movement culture inform globalization?

As an artist and practice-based researcher, I am interested in the topics of globalization and how we self-define culture. I would like to propose a moderated casual discussion around these topics. As a moderator, I would focus on the following: 1. We create culture everyday by the choices we make, how we identify ourselves and by the stories we tell each other. There is a lot more room to create our culture than we typically realize. So what is culture (beyond ethnicity) and how do we contribute to continuing or creating culture? 2. As dancers/movement artists who work within a cross-cultural medium, what are the defining characteristics of the inclusive yet diversity driven nature of our art form? How can the dance/movement culture inform currently developing globalization? Using this knowledge of dance/movement culture, how can dancers and movement artists become leaders in a globally connected society, beyond entertainment?

Stephanie Sherman

Candidata Doctoral en Performance Studies, Departamento de Teatro, Danza y Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Constraints, Borders, Space, and Moving Bodies

In her book, I Want to be Ready, Danielle Goldman uses dance improvisation as a critical lens to a more nuanced understanding of the politics of freedom in an inextricable relation to ever-shifting constraints. By complicating the notion that freedom from constraint is wholly achievable, she understands politics as an always unfixed, mobile negotiation from one tight place to another. Goldman’s gestural reading of the political negotiation of tight spaces urges the question of what these spatial constraints might look like, both architecturally and socially, and how different racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects move through them. In this paper, I see the classification of borders (walls, boundaries, skin, stone) revealed as violent constraints that produce a sort of political contact improvisation dance between subjects and space. I am interested in how these surfaces/borders/constraints interact with each other in terms of movement and subjectivity: How does stone shape skin and vice versa? How does social space construct objective space, and how does that shape the differential subjects in that space? How do those subjectivities shape, change, enforce, or resist social space?

Tania Galindo Ramírez

Comunidad de Butoh Latinoamerocano

Butoh Latinoamerocano

I don't have the exact details about my presentation yet. However my hope is to use all the discussions and what will happen during the forum to propose an interesting discussion about Butoh.

Mandy Greenlee

Embodying Theory

Discussing the topics of phenomenology as discovered by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Western philosophy, along with mindfulness and non-dualism in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy I would create an environment where information is offered in a way that keeps the listeners engaged in their own embodied experience. This presentation will be discussion based. We will continuously track where our attention is as a means to stay connected to our direct experience of the material being offered. Dance scholars Maxine Sheets Johnstone and Sondra Fraleigh examine the philosophy of phenomenology and how it applies to dance and dancer as a lived experience. Launching off from this research I have extended it into the audience also as a live entity having a lived experience. I would like to discuss the absorption of theoretical information in the same spirit engaging in an enlivened, present and embodied discussion where the listeners are engaged and connected to how information is received into their whole being (body/mind/spirit). We will stay engaged in awareness of when individually our attention drifts; when and where we feel most alert in the room; and how we are configured. Essentially I want this class to be deliverance of theory from an experiential environment hopefully guiding participants into a deepened and embodied understanding of how they absorb information.

Rachael L. Shaw

Temporary Assistant Lecturer Department of Theatre and Dance University of Wyoming Nicholas Webster Graduate Student Department of Philosophy University of Wyoming

Moving Aristotle

Inspired by the TED Talk Dance vs. powerpoint, a modest proposal by John Bohannon, this piece will investigate others ways of bringing dance (and perhaps an appreciation of dance) to more varied audiences.We would like to investigate using moving, live bodies within such a presentation (instead of an inanimate or digital support). In it, we will use dance as a counterpart in a philosophical presentation discussing Aristotelian ideals in contemporary society. Our interest is not to diminish the art of dance or the importance of the oral presentation, but rather to find a way to have them support one another.

Anadel Lynton Snyder

CenidiDanza INBA

In the edge

Dialogue and action about dance and community. We make a circle in space, everyone carries a dry branch on one hand and a branch with flowers on the other to keep balance. When a branch falls I try to pick it up without using my fingers. Witnesses are invited to participate in the circle. We all walk in a spiral and move forming infinite symbols creating a small dance and move as the four elements. Everyone is invited to pick a flower or two to play with balance. After a while they are invited to pick a small paper that holds a question out of a basket and to them read the question out loud. Then, they are asked to ask a question of their own as an offering. There will be an explanation about the questions, since they come from Rarámuris texts about the possible responsibilities to counteract the destructions of nature's elements. We try to evoke the balance human beings should seek for in their own lives to be in harmony with nature. Nowadays the opposite happens, humans must be urged to stop exploiting and destroying nature. Life and death are not in balance. It's us who dream that there is a future, we have to act for it to happen. We seek to interact between us and nature. We dance for the joy of reuniting in parties, for the resistance where hope is born, recreating the plan of life that was created by divinities and by us in a community world view.

Claudia Landavazo Rentería

Executive Director Proagrupa B.C. Project coordination, researcher and performer in the Spontaneous Art Collective.

Spontaneous Dance (a participatory tool for community work)

Presentation of an open process in the conformation and construction of a Spontaneous Dance method, based on the application of participative theatre's body language. This proposal is a performance conference.

Daniel Jiménez García (compositor/ artista sonoro) y Elba Irma Emicente Sánchez (intérprete)

Techniques applied to Videodance Soundtrack

Based on the theory of the composer and French filmmaker Michel Chion, this theory platform is presented as aPerformative Conference, making clear and didactic public examples of musicalización of scenes and the creation of different atmospheres within a work, either dance or dance video in real time. Film and dance are closely linked, since both are performative and visual arts, and usually require a sound platform. That is why this conference discusses the relationship of film, dance and music. It is a fact that 80 % of choreographies concentrate more on the movements, scenery, lighting, etc., and leave in the background, music, enough to please the choreographer or go with proper BIT, but generally music is not exploited to the fullest. The aim of this conference is to present some techniques for how to make music, not just as a setting for the choreography, but also as a complement and reinforcement of the work.

Lindsey Drury

The Objects of Yvonne Meier

In the Summer of 2013, I began working with choreographer Yvonne Meier (2 Bessie awards, NEA Masterpiece Grant, one of the founders of PS122), helping her to protect her videos and written scores to create an archive of her work and protect her documentation for historicization. I was awarded a position at the New Media Lab at the CUNY Graduate Center to transfer her videos and U-Matic tapes to digital format. Because her documentation was almost all compromised by Hurricane Sandy, I am racing against time to transfer her tapes before the water damage further compromises them and/or they deteriorate. It is the resulting documentation and interviews with Yvonne Meier about her work that I plan to present.

I propose to present a theory platform on Objects and Dance, not merely from the perspective of the use of objects in dances, but regarding the question of history- how we leave traces of dance, how we document dance through objects. The irony of Yvonne's work is that though her dances involve objects, relating bodies to objects and making objects of dance, the history of her works has been much ignored simply because her objects (and her archives) are convoluted and gigantic. Her work is difficult to deal with in many ways, it is irreverent, almost impossible to stage, and incredibly unwieldy to document (for example her work the Shining was done with hundreds of refrigerator boxes in almost complete darkness). In this theory platform I will address Meier's use of objects to make a greater ephemerality to her works, against both how dancers tend to perceive objects (as stable in that they are things while movement is always changing), and how objects tend to be used for dance history-making (as the "traces" left behind after the event). By addressing the work I have been doing with Yvonne to stabilize the history of her work and prepare her archive for further re-enactments of her early works, I will further relate to the issues that arise in dance between bodies and objects.

Javier Alejandro Pérez Caicedo

Body languages ​​from and to the street

A roundtable dialogue format. The idea is to exchange views related to the street as a forum and a space for training, and identify as artistis the languages of movement that we recognize, experience, or are curious to engage with.

Lilly Castro Marengo

BrainDance techniques created by Anne Green Gilbert, Rima Faber and adapted by Lilly Castro.

I will show the techniques used which have had a positive impact with my student, including showing videos of children with challenges that have progressed through the Brain Dance and technique. Students like Andrea, who died about 5 years ago from a Spinal Atrophy Type One. She loved dancing and with 3 fingers, nose, mouth and eyes she showed us how we could dance. As well I will intoduceMaria Jose who is 3 feet tall and lives with respirator. I have worked with many conditions from Turner Syndrome, Osteogenesis Genetics, Albinism, cancer and others. How to create music with elements that are available in the moment. (For example a hospital bed curtain, a beep pulse, and our vocals.) God provides no limits.