Conference Program Book - Congress on Research in Dance

TACTICAL BODIES:
THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF NON-DANCING SUBJECTS
A joint conference of:
<strong>Congress</strong> on Research in Dance (CORD) Special Topics
and the UC Dance Studies Graduate Student <strong>Conference</strong>
Dance Under Construction (DUC)
April 19-21, 2013
University of California, Los Angeles
Supported in part by the UCLA Dream Fund of the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Funded by: Campus <strong>Program</strong>s Committee of the UCLA <strong>Program</strong> Activities Board; UCLA School of Arts and
Architecture Dean's Office; UCLA Center for Performance Studies; UC-Riverside Department of Dance;
UC-Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; UCLA Department of Germanic
Languages; UCLA Center for the Study of Women; UCLA LGBTQ Campus Resource Center; UCLA Asia
Institute; UCLA SOAA Graduate Student Organization; Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
Special thanks to: Ashanti Pretlow (CORD), Angelia Leung, Daniel Millner, Susan Leigh Foster, Lillian Wu,
Ginger Holguin, Arsenio Apillanes, Muriel Moorhead, Will O’Loughlen, Mark Goebel, and the Department of
World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

Tactical Bodies: The Choreography of Dancing Subjects will interrogate the possibilities and
problematics of choreographic analysis. Choreographers, dance researchers and others have extended the
concept of choreography to works that do not necessarily involve danced movement, challenging the
assumption that choreography must relate to dance and vice versa. In scholarly and other projects, the
value of choreography as an approach and a means of analysis has been demonstrated across cultural
sites as well as in a variety of disciplinary domains. Yet interdisciplinary exchange is rare both because of
the manner in which the academic disciplines are organized in the institution, and because of the marginal
position that dance has historically held as an art form and area of study.
Tactical Bodies provides an opportunity to enrich the discourse surrounding “choreography” on the one
hand, and on the other, to ask what the concept does in disciplines other than dance studies. We invite
submissions from researchers in disciplines such as performance studies, curatorial studies, comparative
literature, art history and criticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, disability studies, postcolonial
studies, urban planning, education, and history, as well as art practitioners, curators, social justice
activists, and scholars studying human behavior in the health and other sciences.
<strong>Conference</strong> Committee
Co-Chairs: Alison D’Amato, UCLA
Doran George, UCLA
Sarah Wilbur, UCLA
Committee: Brynn Shiovitz, Rita Valente, Pallavi Sriram, Mana Hayakawa, I-Wen Chang,
Andy Martinez, Olive McKeon, Sarah Murdock, Meena Murugesan, Gwenyth Shanks;
Andrea Y. Wang, Alexx Shilling, Jennifer Aubrecht, Meghan Quinlan, Natalie Zervou
Carl Schottmiller, Emily Beattie, Sharna Fabiano, Sarah Jacobs
The <strong>Congress</strong> on Research in Dance (CORD) is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides
opportunities for dance professionals from a broad range of specialties to exchange ideas, resources, and
methodologies through publication, international and regional conferences, and workshops. We encourage
research in all aspects of dance and related fields and promote the accessibility of research materials.
The <strong>Congress</strong> on Research in Dance is an international organization of dance scholars, educators, and
artist that aims to strengthen the visibility and increase the reach of dance as embodied practice, creative
endeavor and intellectual discipline. CORD advances innovative understandings of dance by promoting
diverse approaches and a globally inclusive, respectful dialogue in the dance field and across disciplines.
CORD Mission Statement:
CORD promotes a globally inclusive respectful dialogue around embodied and discursive approaches to
dance research. Building on the rich legacy of dance scholarship, CORD advances innovative and creative
understandings of dance. Through mentorship, advocacy, and outreach, CORD fosters an international
community of current and future dance leaders.
www.cordance.org
DANCE UNDER CONSTRUCTION is an interdisciplinary forum for presenting graduate student work
theorizing dance, performance, and the body. It originated as an initiative of the graduate students of
UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures and has been hosted by various UC campuses. DUC has
grown to an annual student-run event for dance and performance scholars, as well as those in related
disciplines. Designed for the development of intellectual inquiry in a supportive and rigorous environment,
the conference offers students a chance to explore through experimental modes of research and
performance. This interdisciplinary event provides a rare and important discursive space for the stimulation
and presentation of cutting-edge research in topics relating to the body as a site of cultural identification.
Previous conferences have addressed artistic and intellectual exploration of themes such as the Politics of
Choreography, Black Aesthetics, Technology and Dance, Globalization, Economies in Motion,
Transnational Bodies, Gender and Sexuality, Dance and Popular culture, and Postcolonialism and
Performance.
www.danceunderconstruction.com

FRIDAY APRIL 19, 2013
11:45-1:15 panel: Transformation, Translation, Interpretation [200]
panel: Critical Origins [208]
panel: Embodied Poetics: Creative strategies of incongruity [230]
workshop: Feldenkrais with Thomas Kampe [240]
1:30-3 panel: Moving audience [200]
panel: Choreographic Information [208]
panel: Critical Inscriptions [230]
3:15-4:45 panel: Body and Beyond [200]
panel: Protest and Revolution [208]
panel: Modes of Participation [230]
5-6:30 Spotlight Panel [200]
6:30-8 Opening Comments: Dr. Susan Leigh Foster [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]
Introductions: <strong>Conference</strong> co-chairs
SATURDAY APRIL 20, 2013
10am-4pm performance: ”pivot point” [Wilson Plaza, outdoor quad just in front of GKH]
9:30-11 panel: Being Observed [200]
panel: Constructing Capacity [208]
workshop: Meditation with Gerald Casel [230]
workshop: Pain Practices with Kathy Westwater [240]
11:15-12:15 Keynote Address: Dr. Gabrielle Brandstetter [200]
Introduction: Dr. Susan Leigh Foster
12:15-1:30 Keynote Reception [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]
1:45-3:15 panel: Critiquing the Institution [200]
panel: Production Panel [208]
roundtable: Movement and Action in the Production of Art Objects [230]
panel: Tempo and Tactics [240]
3:30-5 panel: Meta Choreographies of the Dance Company [200]
panel: Colonial Encounter [208]
roundtable: Choreographing Authority in Community Arts Interventions [230]
panel: Local, national, global [240]
roundtable: Un-masking Dance Making: Choreographies of Production [101]
5:15-6:45 panel: The Composition of Curating [200]
panel: Duos and Gender [208]
panel: Pedestrian Life [230]
panel: Suiting up: It's Bigger than the Body in Corporate Culture [240]
SUNDAY APRIL 21, 2013
panel: Moving Mass Culture [101]
11-1 Keynote Workshop: Body Maps with Tim Miller [200]
10-11:30 panel: Faith and the Afterlife [208]
panel: Citizen Bodies [230]
panel: Recordings of Movement [240]
roundtable: Fat Black Monkey [101]
11:45-1:15 panel: Experience and Methodology [230]
panel: Advancing Identity [240]
panel: Architecture Environment Museum [101]
1:15-2 DUC 2013/1014 Planning Session [208]
2-3 Keynote performance: Tim Miller, SEX/BODY/SELF [200]
3-4 Post Performance Reception [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013
* Denotes performance/practice as research
All events held in Glorya Kaufman Hall
11:45-1:15pm
TRANSFORMATION, TRANSLATION, INTERPRETATION [room 200]
Moderator: Anurima Banerji
Anna and Lawrence Halprin: Choreographing Body and Environment with the RSVP Cycles
Alison D’Amato, UCLA
Since the 1960s, Anna Halprin has made scoring a central component of her choreographic practice, using
scores to grant performers self-direction within an organized whole and to cultivate a heightened awareness
of the physical environment. A significant, and perhaps under-analyzed influence remains Halprin's
husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who conceptualized the environment itself as a score
in dynamic interplay with the pedestrian body. This presentation explores the fruitful exchange of ideas
between the Halprins: Anna's role in helping Lawrence conceptualize his systematic scoring technique (the
RVSP Cycles), as well as the effect of the cycles on Anna's subsequent choreographic output.
Physical Beats: The Phenomenological Study of Abstract Choreography *
LaTeesa Joy Walker, UC Davis
My approach to experimenting with tactile bodies employs a collaborative open structured choreographic
process with Oobleck (matter transformation), media and sound. My objective is to innovate a movement
practice I refer to as physical beats, a sound dance. Methodology: 1) play sustained sound waves at length
for the Oobleck to react to. 2) Video its reactions. 3) Compose recorded sounds that mimic the rhythmic
patterns of the Oobleck’s reactions. 4) Add the sound to the video. I intend to investigate the effects of this
multilayered mode of production and use the outcomes to interpret the phenomenological aesthetics of
physical beats.
Diasporic Chinese Body – MAMA/Medea *
Jia Wu, Saint Mary's College of California
For a Chinese woman working in the United States, I must always ask myself what is dance diaspora? For
me, “diaspora” is a lived term, evoking evolutions of forms (folk dance, Chinese classical) and self. In the
constant translations of self, one’s language and even authenticity must be negotiated in the constant
present. How does one teach the movements from another self, time, and place, when one is disconnected
from the original lifestyle and values that created the movement? How does one interpret for the “other” a
traditional and culturally specific form of dance (i.e. an ethnic form of dance, or a spiritual form of dance)
without falling prey to co-optation, exoticization, and cultural tourism? What kinds of cultural meaning,
values and capital are lost in the process, and how to we reclaim them? In what ways is having a diasporic
identity to always be “in translation?”
CRITICAL ORIGINS [room 208]
Moderator: Jacqueline Shea Murphy
Choreographies of Afropean-ness: West African Dance and the Italian Geographical Imagination
Claudia Brazzale, Liverpool University
Over the past decade so-called African dance has become increasingly popular in Italy growing in tandem
with local West African diasporic communities and the national concern over immigration. Although the
circulation of African dance provides West Africans migrants with an important form of self-identification and
subsistence, it often revolves around problematic discourses rooted on the myth and romance with the
primitive. Constructing and capitalizing on the fetishization of black bodies, African dance mobilizes complex
economies of desire that rest on an orientalist fascination with the Other. Whilst these economies reify racist
stereotypes, they also enable significant communities of knowledge and interracial encounters. In a context
of increasing xenophobia, can African dance choreograph new ‘Afropean’ communities that decenter the
grand narrative of Italian nationhood?

The Fingers Behind the Spectacle - The Invisible Labor of Craftsmen, Costumiers and the Drummers
in Kathakali and Kutiyattam
Anisha Rajesh, Texas Woman’s University
This essay attempts to bring to light the invisible and audible fingers, and their labor behind the production
of two spectacles, Kathakali and Kutiyattam. These invisible fingers include the koppu maker (craftsman)
who carves the woodwork of traditional accessories and headgears, the chutti artists (costumiers) who
decorates these accessories, applies the elaborate make up and attire, and the drummers who gives life to
the mudras (hand gestures), and the spectrum of expressions navigating the emotional intricacies of
different characters. Each step is toiled and labored by these artists at different points of time resulting in
the production of the spectacle.
Choreographing a Tactical Taiwan: The Body and Politics in Wang Mo-Lin’s My Body, My Country
Fan-Ting Cheng, UCLA
Since 2000, various Taiwanese artists have attempted to choreograph and orchestrate tactical forms of
resistance while working within and against the national/governmental constructions and Chinese centrist
policies advanced by the Kuomintang. Wang Mo-Lin’s My Body, My Country (2003) suggests an alternate
measure of the efficacy of the politics implicit in a social kinesthesis. The piece claims that Taiwanese
bodies have internalized the historical trauma of the 40-year Martial law period and highlights the
contemporary anxiety exacerbated by diplomatic impasses. I argue that the artist tactically manipulates the
government’s pro-Beijing policies and reveals the troubled, sensitive relationship between Taiwan and
China.
EMBODIED POETICS: CREATIVE STRATEGIES OF INCONGRUITY [room 230]
Moderator: Lionel Popkin
Embodied Poetics: Choreographing the Stumble and the Stutter
Cid Pearlman, UCSC and Cabrillo College | Denise Leto, UC Berkeley
Choreographer Cid Pearlman and poet Denise Leto will discuss their interdisciplinary collaboration (with
cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and conductor Maya Barsacq) entitled Your Body is Not a Shark. Among the four
collaborators, one has Multiple Sclerosis and one has Laryngeal Dystonia. Working with movement scores,
visual imagery, text, and music, Shark is a rigorous investigation into the notion of heroic, virtuosic
embodiment. Using “the stutter and the stumble” as inspiration for kinetic, aural, and poetic research, they
will explore the unexpected subject: bodies in difference via challenges in physical capacity or a diminishing
of social presence. It is the moment just before the lapse, the anticipation of falling as metaphor that informs
this collaboration. In much the same way our culture deals with aging – anticipating, hiding, or trying to fix
our bodies – we cannot ultimately deflect the processes and impact of time.
On a Multiplicity *
Telma João Santos, University of Évora
Along 2011, the final year working on my PhD dissertation in Mathematics, I decided to video record
movement analysis inside each of the (three) houses where I lived along that year, with one fixed rule: to do
it after several hours of mathematical study. On a Multiplicity is a result of a process of creating movement
videos as instruments of analysis and to develop a communication of the process, rebounding between
them, and using Mathematics (Calculus of Variations), as well as movement analysis based on
Improvisation Techniques, and of the several choreographic environments that can arouse from this specific
connection. Deconstructing body-mind dualism has been a central issue in research, due to developments
in technology and the importance of emotions in creating knowledge. On a Multiplicity can be seen as an
auto ethnographic example on body mind debate, using Mathematics and Dance as the dualist characters.
FELDENKRAIS WORKSHOP [room 240]
The Art of Making Choices: The Feldenkrais Method as Choreographic Process
Thomas Kampe, Feldenkrais Method ® Practitioner
This workshop will explore The Feldenkrais Method (FM) as a choreographic resource for learning, selfconstruction
and creative practice. FM is understood as a learning-process concerned with questions
regarding agency, choice-making and ‘self-imaging’ (Beringer 2001). Feldenkrais proposed a non-

eductionist thinking ‘with images, patterns and connections’ (2010:88), constructed through multi-modal
self -imaging. Such embodied, patterned and divergent thinking can be posited as choreographic thinking.
The workshop focuses on how questions and strategies found in FM function as tools for choreographic
thinking, and how such processes can be transferred beyond their educational domain.
Friday 1:30-3pm
MOVING AUDIENCE [room 200]
Moderator: Peter Carpenter
Choreographing Spectatorship: Performance as Research *
Kelly Bond, Independent Artist | Melissa Krodman, Independent Artist
Choreographic analysis has traditionally focused on movement of dancers on stages and in alternative
spaces with less consideration of an audience’s role in the creation of a performative environment, including
ways in which their active engagement can be integral to the choreography. How can the experiences and
behaviors of the spectator, either individually or collectively, be considered when they are neither
consistently predictable nor repeatable? How can investigations into the audience’s experience advance
conceptual inquiry? Choreographing spectatorship examines intricacies of the audience-performer
relationship while introducing larger questions of individuality and society, conformity and resistance, desire
and repression, truth and fiction.
Choreographing of spectatorship: a Taiwanese Female’s Photo Essay in Paris
I-Wen Chang, UCLA
A majority of tourism studies have looked at “Western” tourists and their impact on non-West communities
and places. However, there is a reverse paradigm, where the Westerner becomes the object of the gaze. In
2009, Taiwanese musician Yang Ya-ching undertook her ironic choreographic photography project “Kiss
Paris.” Her choreography of gesture and movement in the context of visual art is a parody of the romantic
Paris stereotype. Through examining the juxtaposition of French and Taiwanese, men and women, locals
and tourists, I reflect on how Yang Ya-Ching uses her choreography in the photos to illuminate issues of
representation and exoticism.
Choreographing Space: Preparing Audiences for Participation
Cecile Paskett, University of Utah | Rachael L. Shaw, University of Wyoming
The spaces in which dance is performed are often not taken into account when considering audience
experience. Audiences of theatre and dance are accustomed to attending proscenium performances, where
they view a stage performance while passively seated. Though common, it can be said that this
arrangement has a negative effect on participatory performance, as the physical layout of the theater works
to discourage audience interactivity through the circumscription of sociocultural expectations. This paper
examines the ways in which lobby spaces can be choreographed using color, sound, movement, and subtle
environmental cues to help prepare audience members, thus promoting interactivity.
CHOREOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: Technological Productions Bodies and their Movements
Moderator: Dino Dinco [room 208]
Allison Wyper, Independent Artist
Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto
Micha Cárdenas, University of Southern California
Responding to the artistic tradition of “tactical media,” this panel seeks to consider the stakes of
choreographic practice within tactical media art to locate the importance of movement to tactical media and
to explore tactical potentials in choreographic practice. Defining choreography very broadly to include
writing movements for bodies in physical space and also for identities in virtual spaces, “Choreographic
Information: technological productions of tactical movement” features presentations by artists Micha
Cardenas and Allison Wyper, and information scholar Patrick Keilty. Cardenas and Wyper present on
their Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets). This artivist project works to create networks of communication
to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and
other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. Cardenas and Wyper discuss the role of
what they call “choreographic structures of resistance and support” and interactive technologies, both

designed with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to
function. Keilty describes interventionist forms of “tagging” within Xtube, a database of sexual
representation. Particularly for individuals who experience non-normative desire, Keilty explains how such
tagging practices provide a means for describing and structuring feelings of difference into coherent
identities and particular social forms for socio-sexual engagement and self-exploration and understanding.
In this paper, Keilty considers the manipulation of identity in an information database to describe how we
might consider information to serve a choreographic purpose within tactical contexts. [Pre-constituted panel]
CRITICAL INSCRIPTIONS [room 230]
Moderator: Olive McKeon
"Grammatology" of a Performing Body
Singar-Mani, Nalanda-NrityaNipuna, Odissi-Jyoti Kaustavi Sarkar, Ohio State University
I investigate Derrida’s claim to salvage gesture from logocentric repression using South Asian
choreographic analysis. I examine the pre-verbal gestic articulation that metaphorically projects an affective
imprint in the materiality of the body by intervening Derrida’s psychoanalytic reading. I isolate corporeal
breaching in his grammatology or the study of writing. I replace his gramme by my soma as differance, a
spatially and temporally differential space that I argue is originary in the dancing body. I complicate the
metaphysical assumption of equality between logos, truth and phonic materiality. I reinscribe the “bodymetaphor”
as provenance of Derrida’s phone in analyzing subjectivity.
Choreography as Future Writing
Megan Nicely, University of San Francisco
Moving is repeating the future: dancing the not-yet" (Manning). This paper explores “future writing,” a term I
use to understand choreographic thinking in motion. In much contemporary dance practice, the mover’s
choices and decisions during performances of “set” choreography allow life’s affective force to intervene
and act. In the interval between what is planned/“maintained” (past) and what is unknown/“modulated”
(future) are multiple potentials that can be activated and lived out. Drawing on 15 years of dance practice
and the writings of Bergson, Deleuze, Manning, and Noland/Ness, I investigate this layer of the
choreographic as writing into the “already and not-yet.
Subjectivity and Gaga
Wendy Rucci, New College of Florida
Phenomenology and dance studies, taken together, challenge us to reevaluate the body’s role in dance
performance as a site of subjectivity, as well as to authenticate the first-person corporeal experience as a
method of describing and understanding in dance performance. As a contemporary dance methodology,
Ohad Naharin’s movement language, Gaga, has transformed the moving body to be the site of both
subjectivity and objectivity. Using Maxine Sheet-Johnstone’s The Phenomenology of Dance and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, this paper attempts to look at notions of intersubjectivity,
particularly the dual nature of the body and what it means for the body to be the primary site of
understanding (for objects inside and outside of it), and how these notions manifest themselves in Gaga.
Friday, 3:15-4:45pm
BODY AND BEYOND [room 208]
Moderator: Alison D’Amato
Anatomical Research and The Fantasy of Spectatorship: Rocking, Taxidermy and the Red Heel *
Anya Cloud, CSU San Marcos | Karen Schaffman, CSU San Marcos
This performance-paper examines our collaborative choreographic research called the The Fantasy Project.
Recently performed at University of California San Diego, the evening-length work seeks to challenge ways
that anatomical research is perceived, particularly in terms of gender and spectatorship. We draw
inspiration from Rachel Poliquin's The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and Cultures of Longing, which explores
the choreography of taxidermy as spectacle located within a specific cultural moment. We consider The
Fantasy Project to be an embodied “curiosity” that traverses the contours of the real and imagined. Whose
fantasy is this? Here, we tackle the impossible analysis of our own work.

Dance of Entanglements: Human and Non-Human Phenomena in Computational Performance
Margaret Jean Westby, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada)
How does agency play a part in the dynamic dance of entanglements of human and non-human
phenomena? Through a feminist perspective that provides critical awareness of how the human body is
connected to the process and the effect of computational machines, I aim to present an analysis of two
performance works by Australian artist Nancy Mauro-Flude’s Error_in_Time and Montreal-based Anne
Goldenberg’s Diaphanous Algorithms. Sociologist Judy Wajcman boldly remarks that to achieve an
“emancipatory politics of technology”, one must think beyond “hardware and software; it needs wetware-
bodies, fluids, human agency” (Wajcman: 2004:35). Therefore, what can the process of choreography and
movement creation that focus so intuitively with the body provide to our discussion of agency, computational
materiality, and interdisciplinary collaborative practice?
Soulography: Modern Dance, Liturgical Dance
Michelle T. Summers, University of California, Riverside
Since the 1950s, the Sacred Dance Guild has attempted to integrate dance into various Christian church
spaces through the training of bodies in modern dance techniques. The rhetoric of the materials in the
Sacred Dance Guild Archive invoke the idea of modern dance interiority as a particularly American,
Christianized pursuit. This attempt to choreograph modern, religious bodies is still in process as evidenced
by the Sacred Dance Guild Festival I attended in the summer of 2012. I argue that contemporary
manifestations paired with archival evidence reveals how “white” Christian embodiment emerges through
these choreographies of the soul.
PROTEST AND REVOLUTION [room 208]
Moderator: Rosemary Candelario
Occupy San Francisco Bodying Bodies Multiple
duskin drum, University of California, Davis
I shall use the emerging speculative philosophy of object oriented ontology (OOO) and Lynn Margulis and
Dorion Sagan’s writings about autopeotic entities to consider Occupy San Francisco as an autonomous
entity/body. Margulis and Sagan point to the creation of semi-permeable membranes as a defining feature
of organisms/bodies/entities. The semi-permeable membrane of Occupy San Francisco was partially
created and maintained by the choreography of human and non-humans. I shall look at the movements,
density, and stillness of these bodies in a confrontation with security forces seeking to destroy the emergent
entity and at a routine daily General Assembly.
Dania Ben Sassi: Sonic/ Transnational/ Choreography/ in Revolution
Leila Tayeb, Northwestern University
This paper investigates the work and reception of Dania Ben Sassi, a singer who became famous in Libya
in 2011 after she recorded a series of songs in Tamazight (Berber) dedicated to the February Revolution.
Through an examination of Ben Sassi’s music and it’s spread, this paper employs the concept of
choreography to talk about movement of two sorts: the dual, multi-directional movement of Libyan refugees
and diasporic “returners,” and the non-commercialized and often illicit movement of recorded music, both in
the context of widespread protest, civil war, and revolution.
Choreography as Political Struggle: On the West Coast Port Blockade
Olive McKeon, UCLA
This essay explores the resources and limits of choreographic analysis as a methodology to study instances
of political struggle, which often hinge on a series of collective embodied actions. Choreographic analysis
opens up the meaning-making processes and forms of identification that take place when bodies overflow
into the street, block a passageway, or occupy a terrain. Through an analysis of the West Coast Port
Blockade that shut down ports up and down the Pacific coast on December 12th, 2011, I show how one
might use choreography as an analytic frame for social movements, what it is able and unable to render
about a political situation.
MODES OF PARTICIPATION [room 230]
Moderator: Lindsay Brandon Hunter

The Choreography of Communitas: Ritual and Kinesthetic Connection in Flash Choreographies
Rachel Oliver, UC Boulder
“Flash choreographies”, also known as dance mobs, are now a prominent form of social dance-media.
Through the lens of phenomenology, I explore the lived experience of the flash choreography performer, as
individuals who are fully engaged in the participation of this event. According to Victor Turner, this
awareness in a collective, embodied practice creates communitas, a “moment in and out of time,” in which
everyone is equal. In this paper, I posit that there is a draw to this phenomenon of flash choreographies
because there is something missing in contemporary life: that of the kinesthetic lived experience of
communitas.
Choreographing Response: Online Game of Shopping and the Digital Puppet Master
Sahar Sajadieh, University of California, Santa Barbara
It’s a game! You don’t know who is on the other side, a human or a machine! All you know is the items you
have been watching for a while and the possibility of buying them cheap or losing them to the others! In this
paper, I explore the performativity of the texts and digital features of online shopping websites and the
impact of the existence of other tele-shoppers to motivate you to push the “Checkout” button and “Place an
Order”. Now the main question becomes: “Who the real choreographer of the movements in this game is?”
Generation Sweat: Revving the Engine of Commerce with Ryan Heffington
Rebecca Pappas, Independent Artist
Generation Sweat is a choreographic analysis of labor in Ryan Heffington's hugely popular Sweaty
Sundays class at the Sweat Spot in Silverlake, Los Angeles.The class offers many possibilities for
understanding the relationship between effort, commerce and the body in contemporary urban America,
particularly within the industries of dance and exercise. I examine the structure and motion of the class in
relationship to Michael Hardt's work on affective labor, Maruizio Lazzarato's concept of immaterial labor,
Kathi Weeks' writing on work, and Susan Foster's notion of the industrial body.
Friday, 5:00-6:30pm
SPOTLIGHT PANEL [room 200]
Moderator: Doran George
From choreo-politics to choreo-policing: dissensus, mobilization, revolt
André Lepecki, New York University
Taking as a point of departure Jacques Rancière's distinction between "politics" and "police" I will move
towards some theories of action in political thought that may illuminate how a critique of freedom reemerges
as fundamental imperative tied to the task of the dancer. I would like to investigate this turn, given
its implications to a general theory of political agency in the context of choreographic practices and see how
choreography may propose political movements away from notions of obedience/command. I will define the
notion of choreo-politics in contradistinction to the notion of "choreo-policing."
Moving Deindustrialization: Detroit, Counter-Choreography, and the Trouble with Ruins
Judith Hamera, Texas A&M University
The Diego Rivera Industry Murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts are internationally renowned, as is Tyree
Guyton’s nearby Heidelberg Project. Both are immersive spaces by artists of color, both engage aspects of
industrialization, and both have fraught histories. To insist on interrelationships between these works is to
expose and challenge neoliberal patterns of capital and corporeal flows across the racialized landscapes of
American deindustrialization, particularly the trope of evacuated “ruins” that characterizes this city’s
postFordist decline. This paper examines patterns of movement between these sites, elements of repetition
within them, and rhythms of civic controversy as counter-choreographies disrupting conventional alignments
of physicality, space, capital, and representation. It argues for the vocabulary of counter-choreography as
urban intervention, a moving iteration of the “right to the city.” A counter-choreographic perspective reveals
American deindustrialization as an ongoing representational and affective project reflecting unease with
U.S. historical intertwinings of race, place, and work.
A Nude Badu: Disruptive Choreographies of Mourning and Nostalgia
Raquel Monroe, Columbia College Chicago

In “Window Seat” hip-hop songstress Erykah Badu appropriates the urban public sphere to highlight the
detriments of “groupthink.” Badu cites JFK as her inspiration, and insists she desired to illustrate the
consequences for those who choose to speak against the status quo. I contend that Badu choreographs a
series of disruptions and citations as she disrobes and walks towards the JFK Memorial Plaza in Dallas, TX.
Her guerrilla style performance concludes with her death from an unidentified gunshot, and re-birth with
braided and beaded hair—the quintessential representation of 1970’s American “blackness.” Her nude
black body disrupts the urban landscape and choreographed mourning of spectators at the Dealey Plaza.
Badu’s violent death evokes the collective memory of similar bodies lost in the struggle for civil rights and
the continuous violence against women. And finally, as the reincarnation of 1970’s blackness, Badu
choreographs nostalgic memories of black power and revolution.
Friday, 6:30-8:00pm
Introductions and Acknowledgements [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]
Doran George, UCLA | Alison D’Amato, UCLA | Sarah Wilbur, UCLA (conference co-chairs)
OPENING COMMENTS [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]
Dr. Susan Leigh Foster, UCLA
SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2013
10:00-4:00pm
pivot point * [Wilson Plaza, in front of Kaufman Hall]
Durational performance. Direction: Alexandra Shilling/alexx makes dances. Brought to life by: Shayna Keller
& Alexandra Shilling. For more information, please see Sunday 10-11:30 panel “Citizen Bodies”.
Share your experience and impressions at www.pivotpointforever.tumblr.com #pivotpointforever
9:30-11:00am
BEING OBSERVED [room 200]
Moderator: Larry Lavender
The Choreography of Community Service: a case study
Krista Bower, Jacksonville University
This paper discusses a project aimed to serve teenage girls residing in a foster care facility through
engagement in a collaborative dance-making process with students from a university dance department.
This choreographic process, involving trained and untrained dancers, provided opportunity to consider the
choreography of the foster care system and the choreography of community engagement. Additionally, the
presentation examines links between embodiment and empowerment by reflecting upon the participants’
realizations of self and others through the development of the dance work. The case study explored a new
format for dance ministry within the context of a faith-based university dance program.
Feed Me:
The Choreography of Audience Engagement at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Melissa Hudson Bell, University of California-Riverside
In 2008, Dance/USA announced a new granting program entitled Engaging Dance Audiences (EDA), which
provided support to artists and presenting organizations with innovative ideas for strengthening
contemporary dance spectatorship. This paper focuses on one of the nine programs selected, Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts (YBCA)’s Smart Night Out, considering it as a choreographic attempt to alter popular
perceptions of the genre of contemporary dance. As a Smart Night Out participant, audience members
attend not only a curated contemporary dance performance, but also choreographed pre and post show
activities with other guests, including icebreaker games, dialogue about visual art on display, danced
exercises that correspond with the performance, and a themed dinner. Engaging theories of production and
reception, I critique this “choreography” that Smart Night Out participants perform. I ask, what does the
selection of these particular activities reveal about the potential inadequacies of current spectatorial modes
and the perceived desires of potential audience members? What is the affective potential of gathering
strangers around food, dialogue, and movement activities in a media-saturated society?

FINDING OGUN *
Kimberley McKinson, University of California-Irvine
In Kingston, Jamaica most homes are defined by a notable set of security features: metal gates that secure
front yards from the street, metal grills that secure verandahs and burglar bars that secure windows.
Though these features dominate the residential landscape, their designs occur not at the hands of “expert”
architects, but at the hands of metal smiths and artisans. In this performance I explore the life of metal
residential security objects in Kingston. In thinking with and through Jamaican metal I consider and reconsider
the genealogical connections between black bodies, geographies, temporalities and technologies.
CONSTRUCTING CAPACITY [room 200]
Moderator: Annie Tucker
Countering Censorship: Advancing and Creating New Modalities for Different Bodies in The Visual
Arts (Movement in the Context of Two-Dimensional Visual Art)
Angela McGuire, Independent Artist
What is the ethical obligation of art and of the artist in the construction of inclusive communities, institutions,
and societies at large? A spinal compression injury left me questioning how to re-approach my art practice
through the lens of pain, medication, and mobility. Limited access to the world has provided a new
perspective on how my own body moves through a world designed for the normative. Research and
experience demonstrates the need for the cross-pollination of practices and interrogation of the ethical
consideration and role of artists in the development of an inclusive society in which no person is censored.
Choreographing Yoga Bodies: The Search for Perpetual Youth in Late-1940s Hollywood
Jennifer Aubrecht, University of California, Riverside
In this paper, I analyze the intersection of bodybuilding, the 1940s health craze, and the sanitized hatha
yoga taught at Indra Devi’s Sunset Boulevard yoga studio, where classes focused on physical poses and
breathwork but did not incorporate the intricacies of yoga philosophy. I propose that her classes rechoreographed
the bodies, minds, and spirits of her students and in the process troubled the common
bifurcation of choreography as the arrangement of either bodies or abstract objects in space. Instead, Devi’s
classes not only made yoga accessible to Americans interested in ‘reducing,’ but also introduced students
to ways use bodily discipline to create change in their lives.
MEDITATION WORKSHOP [room 230]
Choreographing the Mind – A Practice to Map the Meandering Mind
Gerald Casel, California State University, Long Beach
All movement begins with the mind. Recent studies in neuroplasticity prove that the brain is elastic and
transformable. In this workshop, participants will explore this phenomenon by practicing meditation,
observing the breath, the body and the mind’s natural inclination to wander. Participants will reflect on the
‘choreography’ of their minds by drawing a diagram of this pattern, creating a visual representation.
Volunteers will then improvise with prompts taken from these visual cues. The group will finish with a
meditation practice and discussion on the body-mind relationship and the kinship of visual representation,
stimuli and synaptic responses.
Please wear comfortable clothes and if you have it, please bring a meditation cushion (zafu and/or gomden)
or a yoga blanket and block.
PAIN PRACTICES WORKSHOP [room 240]
Kathy Westwater, Independent Artist
Pain has been described as a neurological event. Without inducing pain, we will explore our understanding
of its phenomena, including its opposite, pleasure. A somatically-based movement score will launch this
practice. We will then gather personal and public accounts of pain including those of accident and illness,
war and torture, to choreographically explore what is inscribed in these accounts. You may bring your own;
texts will also be provided. Speculating this content is located within all our bodies, this workshop seeks to
reveal this possibility, and to ask what it means to place ourselves in a choreography of pain.

Saturday 11:15-12:15pm
Keynote Introduction [room 200]
Dr. Susan Leigh Foster, UCLA
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Dr. Gabrielle Brandstetter, Freie Universität, Berlin
Tactical bodies - choreographic arrangements
Perspectives of "New German Dance Studies"
Saturday 12:15-1:30pm
KEYNOTE RECEPTION [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]
Saturday 1:45-3:15pm
CRITIQUING THE INSTITUTION [room 200]
Moderator: André Lepecki
Unfastening the Proscenium Paradigm
Larry Lavender, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Choreography expands and thrives beyond borders erected by dance, yet important expansive work
remains inside dance borders where choreography languishes in nostalgic dependence on a concert dancebased
proscenium paradigm. Through expert-centric results-based criticism that domesticates dances and
dancers, teachers and choreographers routinely enact patriarchal desire to civilize the feral and tame the
wild in movement. Yes, prosceniumicity may spawn an abundance of “aesthetically good art,” but its ethic of
rationalized dominance undermines the good such art might offer the world. I describe practices for
presence-ing as distinct from past-ing performance, seeking to unfasten choreography from the trappings of
prosceniumicity.
Choreographic Offerings:
Examining the Hidden Agendas in Dance Concert <strong>Program</strong>ming in Higher Education
Liz Maxwell, Chapman University
The trend of dance faculty to choreograph has become a necessary exposition and expression of both the
teacher and the artist/scholar. This can provide an on-going connection with his/her own expressive needs
while feeding the academic requirements of a position in higher education. Sometimes, these two
objectives are in conflict with one another and my aim is to further a conversation where these choices can
become more transparent. This paper looks at some differing agendas for creating dances in higher
education. Through a survey of dance faculty, I will create a dialogue to expose some of this unspoken
rationale.
Social Class and Other Disciplinary Choreographies: *
Constructing the Dance Scholar and “His” Stage
Jose Reynoso, Northwestern University
Choreographic scores provided as guidelines for this conference frames this presentation as a situationspecific
choreographic academic performance. I organized my thoughts and bodily actions in a series of
choices that render this academic presentation as a choreographic meta-analysis of its methods, its frames,
and its intentions. Highlighting the subjective inevitability in processes of knowledge production, I reflect on
class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality. In doing so, I offer a rendition of the scholar as specific
subject whose labor renders his body as the means through which Dance Studies seeks to constitute itself
as a legitimate academic discipline within the Humanities and beyond.
PRODUCTION PANEL [room 208]
Moderator: Dan Froot
Choreographing ideas otherwise: a look at the landscape of contemporary dance in Brazil
Dr. Cristina F. Rosa, Florida State University’s School of Dance

In this communication, I look at the choreographic tactics that contemporary artists living in Brazil are
creating between dance and politics and the strategies they employ to reach their goal. Beyond the “theme”
artists address in their work, some of the most significant changes within the landscape of contemporary
dance in Brazil relates to how dance is produced, transmitted, stored, processed, critiqued, and consumed.
Many artists/activist seek to diversify, in particular, some structural elements such as venue, sponsorship,
media, audience, and laboring bodies. Amongst my examples, I will adress Grupo do Dirceu and Grupo
Cena 11.
The Last Dance: Choreographies of Closure
Bonnie Brooks, Columbia College Chicago
Is a dance company a “non-dancing subject?” Or is it a subject full of dances that, like human dancing
bodies, has a lifespan? Does choreography and its analysis offer a viable framework for considering the
process of moving a dance company through its own lifecycle? Using case studies of the Lewitzky Dance
Company (Los Angeles) and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (New York City), with reference to
other examples, this paper examines the “choreographic process” of a “dance of endings” particularly as
related to (institutional and individual) power, leadership, transition, change, dissolution, and legacy in the
current socio-economic environment.
Stripped Club: A Dance through Money, Management, and the Grind
Kristen Stoeckeler, University of Minnesota
I investigate the repertoire of the stripper in the choreographic space of the strip club during the economic
moment of the so-called Great Recession. Drawing from ethnographic and autoethnographic research
undertaken in Minneapolis strip clubs between 2008 and 2011, I argue that the choreography of the strip
club highlights the conventions of embodied negotiations of power and identity through the management
and regulation of bodies, the politics of exchange, and the production of heterosexual space. Furthermore, I
argue that the embodied repertoire and choreography of the stripper reflects an increasing class
stratification exacerbated by the Great Recession.
MOVEMENT AND ACTION IN THE PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF ART [room 230]
Roundtable
Veronique d’Entremont | EJ Hill | Sophie Lee | Zac Monday | Sarah Petersen
Visual Art is physically created and its meaning constructed through the interaction of objects and bodies in
space. In a roundtable discussion, five visual artists, working in 2D, 3D and performance, are invited to
discuss the relationship of their work to choreography, spectatorship, phenomenology and site. They will
consider how the actions used in producing their artwork, the installation and viewer’s interaction with art
objects, and the way in which their art is disseminated and circulated, produces content and constructs
meaning in the work. Panelists are Los Angeles-based artists associated with the UCLA Department of Art.
TEMPO AND TACTICS [room 240]
Moderator: Jens Giersdorf
Thinking on the move: Diffractive practices as embodied ‘agential intra-action’ *
Monika Jaeckel, Independent Artist | Performers: Sharna Fabiano, UCLA & Sarah Jacobs, UCLA
Diffractive strategies as applied by K.Barad in the development of her agential realism offer a ‘reading’ of
concepts or insights through one another. This allows to ‘rework’ traditional views of representation and
questions of how to approach the ‘unseen’, the ‘Other’, as that what is different in its very qualities, and that
not yet belongs to our system of knowing. This proposal of intertwined practices of knowing and becoming
takes L.Chétouane’s ‘Sacré Sacre du Printemps’ to challenge if ‘thinking’ through or from the body - for the
spatial situation already creates a non-representative space of knowing and for the ‘Other’. Performative
lecture with two dancers defining the space: in relation to each other, to the audience, and to the speaker.
Choreography that Resists: Stillness, Dance, and the Tactics of Occupy
Owen David, Ohio State University | Tara Willis, New York University
Our presentation will share dialogue generated at Dance and the Occupy Movement, an on-going forum
hosted by Movement Research. From this base, we urge an investigation of the parallel, divergent, and
tangled figurations of bodies-as-agents in the realms of stage and street. Disrupting the kinetic ontology of

modernist progress, occupation inserts such bodies into public space, and the sustained presence of bodies
not ‘going anywhere’ or ‘doing anything’ ruptures imperatives of hypermobile capitalism through a
kinesthesia of stillness. With the Occupy movement now faded from visibility, we ask: how might theorizing
occupation as a choreographic intervention inform our reading of ‘performing bodies’ and ‘staged dances’?
Suspended Stillness: a balanced step through air, the Funambulist and the Capitalist Critique
Gwyneth Shanks, UCLA
In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant describes the walker, a figure who embodies a condition of
modernity, and is caught within the choreographed acceleration of global capitalism and neo-liberal policies.
If the walker is Glissant’s figuration of modernity, what body might counter this? The figure of the
funambulist and the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s 1974 walk between the Twin Towers is one
answer. While his performance re-choreographed the utterly pedestrian act of walking, the work
complicates bodily stillness. Petit’s first precarious steps onto the wire, documented via photographs,
capture a suspended stillness. This essay mobilizes stillness as a counter model to the hyper-mobilization
of late-capitalism.
Saturday, 3:30-5:00pm
META CHOREOGRAPHIES OF THE DANCE COMPANY [room 200]
Moderator: Bonnie Brooks
Redirections: Energy made Visible through Alonzo King’s Constellation
Dr. Jill Nunes Jensen, Loyola Marymount University
Constellation (2012) is a ballet that moves away from choreographer Alonzo King’s recognizable aesthetic
and toward a visually interdisciplinary space not often mined in his work. With movable set designed by
artist Jim Campbell, in Constellation the LINES dancers dialogue with each other, as well as Campbell’s
small orbs that resemble glowing tennis balls. The lights are grabbed, passed, cradled and exchanged; they
are taken in and out of predetermined places as dancers interact and literally play with energy in an external
way. Though King’s creations are predicated upon manifestations of energy, here he stages the
corporealization of that relationship.
Watching the Stories of José Limón
James Moreno, University of Kansas
How do we choreograph our spectatorial experiences? How do we gather, arrange, and compose our
varied backgrounds to construct meanings from bodies in motion? To explore these questions, I examine
the ways mid-twentieth-century spectators choreographed their experience of viewing the Mexican-born,
gay, and married choreographer, José Limón. I investigate the ways different audience members
understood markers of queerness, straightness, or gayness in Limón’s choreography. I also examine how
audiences recognized markers of whiteness and Mexican-ness in Limón’s performances. How were
audiences able to receive Limón as a white heteronormative figure, while also viewing him as a particular
non-white figure?
Rituals of Abundance for Lean Times #7: Divisions of Labor *
Peter Carpenter, Columbia College
This performance-as-research presentation positions one white, queerly male dance artist in relationship to
choreographies of labor, capital, privilege and visibility. This dance marks the seventh installment of an
ongoing research process begun in Fall 2010. Working with compositional tactics that include reflexive
meta-commentary via talking dances, theatrical hyperbole, low-rent technological incursions, audience
participation and abrupt shifts in representational mode, the choreographer offers his own dancemaking
processes and products as opportunities for integrating themes of choreography, social agency and political
dissidence.
COLONIAL ENCOUNTER [room 208]
Moderator: Angeline Shaka
Rethinking Choreography through a Postcolonial Lens
Sandra Chatterjee, University of Salzburg

In this presentation, I critically interrogate “choreography” from a postcolonial perspective in the context of
European concert dance by analyzing two contemporary (Indian) dance works produced primarily in the
Netherlands: Kalpana Raghuraman's Kiss of Life and Revanta Sarabhai's LDR. Building on previous
theorizations (together with Cynthia Ling Lee), I will here look at dance-making as translation, investigating
Raghuraman's strategy of translating movements from classical Bharatanatyam in Kiss of Life, a piece set
on a contemporary and ballet trained dancer. Sarabhai's piece LDR, will be analyzed as an intermedia
extension of classical natya’s integrated tradition of dance-drama-theater.
When Moctezuma met Cortés….: choreographies of encounter, incursion, and terror
Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, UC-Santa Barbara
The meeting of Emperor Moctezuma and conquistador Hernán Cortés just outside Tenochtitlan in 1519 was
an encounter of shocking significance and impact, marking the conception of a pre and a post of
inconceivable magnitude. The choreographed tactics of encounter and terror have been analyzed,
described, performed, depicted, and discussed in multifarious ways in the ensuing nearly five centuries.
Between 2007 and 2010 the Mexico City-based experimental theater company La Maquina de Teatro
created La Trilogía Mexicana as an exploration of this, and other relationships of encounter, and as a
scholar/artist, I am exploring their creative/performative processes, focusing on tactical encounters between
bodies, as historical acts and as performative presentations.
19 th Century Thanjavur Durbar Hall: The Choreographies of Colonial Modernity
Pallavi Sriram, UCLA
The consolidation of British colonial power in India into the 19 th century presents an important focal point to
re-examine questions of Indian 'modernity'. How are notions of display, visibility, legibility and self-conscious
authenticity at play in the choreographies of embodied court performances? I examine how, in the face of
major socio-political re-structuring, the space of the durbar (concert) hall of the Thanjavur court in southern
India, became a central site of asserting a self-conscious Indian cultural authority through bodily spectacle. I
read court dance (and music) within a nexus of cultural negotiations and maneuvers, against and between
various types of historical record – whether British, Indian, visual, or textual.
CHOREOGRAPHING AUTHORITY IN COMMUNITY ARTS INTERVENTIONS [room 230]
Roundtable
Jenna Delgado, UCLA | Sarah Leddy, Independent Artist | Meena Murugesan, UCLA
This roundtable invites community arts practitioners to consider their relationship to power and authority and
their role in structuring bodily authority. First, the panelists will contextualize how “sharing” unfolds through
these collaborations while attending critically to the reception and consequences of this choreography with
respect to particular project partners and participants. The panel will then attend to how “sharing”
persuades the development or choreographing of relationships between participants, facilitators, and artists.
The roundtable will conclude with reflections from practitioners, administrators, artists, and participants on
the significance that these relationships have upon the ultimate value of the process and final product.
LOCAL, NATIONAL, GLOBAL [room 240]
Moderator: José Reynoso
“Choreographing” a Narrative of “Koreanness”
Areum Jeong, UCLA
This paper explores the relationship between the Korean silent film narrator’s body and his performance in
order to examine how politics and power are articulated through the film narrator’s body. In relation to
Susan Leigh Foster’s idea of “choreography,” this paper argues that the film narrator’s “choreography” is a
form of preparation that uses narrative as a tool for his live, non-reproductive performance.
Digitization and Glocalized Hip-Hop Aesthetics: Palestinians Breaking in the Gaza Strip
Meghan Quinlan, University of California, Riverside
In this project, I explore how digital media is used in the transfer of hip-hop knowledge and aesthetics
across nations and cultures. Specifically, how does digitization enable Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to
engage with hip-hop culture’s American roots and current international movements? How does learning a

dance form primarily through mimesis of digitized bodies on videos, rather than a physically present
teacher, challenge traditional dance pedagogies? I argue that the use of digital media and the particulars of
Palestinian culture under occupation create a uniquely glocalized hip-hop form, which remains intricately
connected to an international “cyber cypher”.
Postcolonial Migrations in the Global Marketplace: (Re)Signifying Orixá Practices
Mika Lior, York University
As Brazilian culture enters the global spotlight, Afro-Brazilian Orixá (dieties) are rapidly adapting to
international stages. The viral spread of these sacred choreographies signals the unbounding of Orixá
symbolism from ethno-historical markers, towards a de-territorialized affiliation through knowledge of
historically secret practices. Charting the emergence of the Orixá onto North American landscapes, this
project looks at the transposition of authority of colonially stigmatized practices. Maneuvering through
secular, religious and theatrical settings, dance teachers Adrianna Yanzuelo and Newton Moraes, and
santero (priest) Andrew MacGregor (re)signify the meaning of syncretic diasporic emblems. How do these
practitioners construct agency in a cosmopolitan cultural marketplace?
UNMASKING DANCE MAKING: CHOREOGRAPHIES OF PRODUCTION [room 101, first floor]
Roundtable
Discussants: Simone Forti | Dan Froot | Rennie Harris | Lionel Popkin | David Roussève | Cheng Chieh Yu
Moderator: Sarah Wilbur, UCLA
This roundtable discussion takes up the masking of non-dance labor within U.S. policy and production
discourse as a call to reframe the production resourcefulness of U.S. dance makers as a critical
choreographic practice in its own right. UNMASKING DANCE MAKING approaches this task from the
perspective of six choreographers: Simone Forti, Dan Froot, Rennie Harris, Lionel Popkin, David Roussève,
and Cheng Chieh Yu. These artists will each speak briefly about the social, material, and institutional
negotiations involved in a current project, and the group will reflect on the implications of this naming for
future dance makers and for the field.
Forti will discuss her archival work with an eye towards facilitating the continued performances in major
museums and art venues of her Dance Constructions of the early 1960s.
Froot will discuss his production choreography for Who's Hungry? a project that weaves together the stories
of five homeless and/or hungry residents of Santa Monica CA into an evening of adult puppet theater.
Harris, founder of Rennie Harris Puremovement, a hip hop dance company dedicated to preserving and
disseminating hip hop culture, will discuss his views on the sustainability of the dance company structure in
the current cultural economy, putting these observations into dialogue with his ongoing work in U.S.
academic dance programs.
Popkin will discuss his modular structure deployed in order to tour his 2009 work, There is an Elephant in
this Dance (2009), in which one or more of the roles can taken on by a local artist depending on the needs
and desires of each particular presenter.
Roussève will discuss his production organization and partnerships for his latest work STARDUST (World
Premiere January 2014) a coming of age story for the electronic age, that follows an African American gay
urban teenager who- never seen onstage- is present only by the emotion laden tweets and text messages
he sends across disparate performance contexts.
Yu plans to discuss her three year stage and video dance collaboration with Guangdong Modern Dance Co.
(China) & The Jumping Frames Dance Video Festival (Hong Kong).
Saturday, 5:15-6:45pm
THE COMPOSITION OF CURATING [room 200]
Moderator: Polly Roberts
The Choreographies Before and Beyond the Work *
Dino Dinco, Independent Artist
Curating is choreography, comprised of the relationship between curator and artist, as well as the spatial

and temporal span of a performance event or “the work”. I argue that curated events mark time and space
along a matrix of valuable movement that must always be examined in order to truly understand “the work,”
including the quotidian movement that occurs between curated events, movement considered pedestrian,
unremarkable, mundane – if considered at all. Drawing from my experience as curator of performance in
Los Angeles, I contend that curating not only moves bodies—of art venue staff, arts writers and readers,
scholars and students– mapping a critical spectra of geography and time. Relationship(s) one has to the
City, and modes of travel within the City, contribute to sense of place, identity, aesthetics, and to art making
and spectatorship. Live performance by UCLA alumnus Rafa Esparza will help us consider curatorial
relationships and the array of choreographies that extend outside and beyond those within the performance.
(Un) W.R.A.P./ Undoing Writing Research And Performance: A Case Study on Curatorial Practices
and Feminist Methodologies in the context of a university dance department
Cristina Goletti, University of Colorado, Boulder
Curatorial practices actively contribute to production knowledge and to the perception of what is dance.
Therefore, especially within the academic context of a dance department, we must look carefully at the
choices we make, as these will influence the young artists we are educating. The case study of
(un)W.R.A.P. a week long event I recently curated, which featured artist Trajal Harrell and dance scholars
Andre Lepecki and Ryan Platt, will offer me the opportunity to look at some of the most recent curatorial
trends and challenges. Furthermore I also examine my curatorial choices through the lens of feminist
methodologies.
DUOS AND GENDER [room 208]
Moderator: Linda Tomko
Gitano/payo: A Dancing Duel
Erica Ocegueda, Arizona State University
There has historically been tension been between Roma (Gitanos) and non-Gitanos (payos) in Spain,
further complicated on the Flamenco stage. As the stage manager for the Flamenco Festival in
Albuquerque, New Mexico I have witnessed a variety of intercultural dynamics on display backstage
between dancers, musicans (músicos), both Gitano and payo. I examine Peña’s show, “A fuego lento” to
demonstrate some of these dynamics during the 2010 Flamenco Festival in Albuquerque. Through the
rehearsal process I was able to witness first-hand the friction between the choreographed bodies of the
various Gitano músicos and company director Peña.
Dance in man: flamenco and gender
Victoria Mateos de Manuel, Philosophy Institute of the Spanish National Scientific Research Council (CSIC)
Vicente Escudero (1888-1980) was a flamenco dancer, choreographer and dance theorist. 1951 he
published a decalogue for masculine flamenco dance, which contained ten statements for men who wanted
to dance flamenco within the masculinity framework. “Dance in man” (bailar en hombre) was the first
statement of this decalogue. Escudero was an innovator of the male flamenco dance, in which men until
then focused primarily on footwork and kept still the upper body. However, the renewal of Escudero also
involved the creation of dancing codes which began to establish an explicit dichotomy between male and
female flamenco dance: the straight against the curved line.
Narcissister, Self-Gratifier, and Penetration as the Displacement of Virtuosity
Ariel Osterweis, Wayne State University
This paper brings together questions of visuality, race, and performance to suggest a feminism
melancholically indebted to its very oppressors. Performance artist Narcissister constructs all her own sets
and costumes, and only appears in mask and merkin. Her insistence on materiality is both DIY and Barbieesque,
abject yet fashionable. Narcissister places the brittle surface of the racist kitsch object onto—and
into—the mutable, muscular surface of a live body. By citing virtuosic tropes from American modern dance,
she disrupts virtuosity’s reliance on a temporality of sustained achievement. Osterweis asks how
Narcissister’s acts of penetration and reverse striptease generate a particular racialized affect, at once
revealing and concealing the body’s labor.

PEDESTRIAN LIFE [room 230]
Moderator: Hannah Schwadron
Choreographing Consumers: Absorbing Spatial Experiences of the World’s Columbian Exposition
Adrienne Stroik, Mt. San Jacinto College
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 presented a version of the urban future envisioned by its
planners. That vision revealed how cities might be organized and how occupants should behave in them.
As fairgoers navigated the spaces of the Exposition they learned how planners wanted them to move
through and function inside cities. The spatial design of the Exposition Grand Basin and its buildings
attempted to impress upon fairgoers that they should engage in urban shopping experiences compatible
with those of downtown mid-range department stores of the twentieth century. Thus the Exposition
foreshadowed how many people would partake in urban shopping in the future.
Walking and the Singular Motion of Memory
Ryan Platt, Colorado College
In dance and daily life, movement supplies a means to an end. In order to contest this attitude, this paper
explores an alternative mode of locomotion, walking. For Michel de Certeau, walking combines ceaselessly
shifting footsteps that elude representational unity and generate “spaces” for singular phenomena from
everyday life. However, due to their continuous motion, these phenomena become visually and emotionally
opaque. As evidence of this opacity, I examine how experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon’s In Memorium
series and W.G. Sebald’s novel, The Rings of Saturn, use walking to delay dramatic form and relay
singular, personal events otherwise excluded from representation.
Performing in Duration: Choreographing Time *
Raegan Truax, Stanford University
As part of my ongoing research around misbehavior, I perform in duration to consider how the body out of
normative time can alter its environment and choreograph time differently. This embodied discussion of my
durational piece 230 Steps in 24 Hours, provokes the following questions: How do I hold time in my body?
How can movement in duration highlight the choreography of everyday life or habitus? “Dance,” employed
here outside a frame of recognizable danced movement, is explored and created within the session as
movement becomes choreographed and takes shape among the multiple bodies in the room.
SUITING UP: IT’S BIGGER THAN THE BODY IN CORPORATE CULTURE [room 240]
moderator: Karen Schaffman
Janet Schroeder | Colleen Culley | Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, The College at Brockport, SUNY
This panel will address the embodiment and choreography of Suits, a corporate, late-capitalist sub-culture.
We will examine how the elements of dance and choreography can bring about positive change and expand
the definition of the working human being/body. We are actively looking to forge new methodologies in
using dance and movement practice as a vehicle for choreographing positive change in the workplace.
Certainly we don't anticipate Wall Street bankers and lawyers waltzing through fields of daisies, but we are
speculating that it is possible to re-choreograph the culture of the multinational corporation. After all, if any
modality is capable of fostering a holistic human experience it is movement, as the essence of movement is
change. [pre-constituted panel]
Schroeder: Working from the idea that ‘culture’ is an abstract concept that can be defined by more concrete
artifacts or examples of its people/place, this presentation uses cultural research linking the traditions of
eastern Mexico with the Appalachian Mountain region of the U.S to develop a methodology for talking about
culture as a choreographed concept. Once established, this methodology is applied to the corporate “suit”
culture, thus demonstrating its wider application beyond dance studies.
Culley: The movement codes the working body is coached and trained to embody create and reflect the
business culture. Beginning with an introduction to the working body through its historical lineage, beginning
in factories where systems like scientific management emphasized a ‘right-way’ efficiency and factories
were designed with the hope of a better life for its workers. Then, based on my work teaching movement in
businesses and business schools, I will examine specific examples of how the body is situated in today’s

working climate. Ultimately, arguing the approach in today’s workplaces may look different and treat the
body differently, but the underlying values are quite similar.
Beauchamp: Through the lens of social constructionist theories, I will address how different cultures and
societal values choreograph our everyday lives. Focus will be on how our work environments, daily routines
and social interactions create neuromuscular and movement pathways that become the composition of our
daily lives creating habits of action, interaction, reaction. Holding the belief that humans experience and
embody their own history and future, I will address how the neuromuscular re-patterning of movement can
instigate positive social change in our work environments and culture.
MOVING MASS CULTURE [room 101, first floor]
Moderator: Lorenzo Perillo
Dancing Religion: When traditional and pop cultures collide
Ruping Wang, Taipei Physical Education College
Dao is one of important religions in Taiwan. When religious view sets guidance for people’s ways of living,
temple festivities reflect trends of the time. When traditional rituals frame the procedure of a festival,
allowing space to include and embrace popular cultures plays a key element for its vitality. This research
will introduce the evolvement of temple festival under the influence of economic structure in Taiwan, and it
will utilize techno Nezha as an example to further investigate the relationships of the religion, the culture,
and life in Taiwan.
Non-dancing Bodies’ Dance Tradition: Ballroom and Latin Dancing in Hong Kong
Maggie Leung, University of Warwick, UK
Today practitioners in the Dancesport industry in Hong Kong try all means to divorce Dancesport from
social dance to elevate the status of the dance and practice. However, a revisit to the emergence of the
Ballrooom and Latin dance shows that the aesthetic tradition was created and sustained by the ordinary
non-dancing bodies in their everyday life. Dance figures are invented by accident and then refined and
passed on in the social dance pool and standardized by institutions when the figures have become norms.
In the light of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of art and event, this paper argues that such intentional separation
of the two dance forms will only undermine the development of the industry and the ecology of the aesthetic
tradition.
Dance There be Rock: *
A choreographic re-framing and analysis of the AC/DC documentary "Let There Be Rock"
Helen Simard, University of Quebec at Montreal
For the past thirty years, Montreal dance artists have embraced rock'n'roll aesthetics, and choreographers
such as Lalala Human Steps' Edouard Lock have established a tradition of creating contemporary dance
shows that resemble stadium rock spectacles. But is it possible to reverse this trend, and view actual rock
performances as choreographic compositions? In this paper, I draw from Spangberg's theory of
choreography as expanded practice and borrow elements from Adshead's frame of choreographic analysis
to re-frame and analyze the 1980 AC/DC documentary Let There Be Rock as a dance performance, thus
arguing for a closer examination of the poetic value of the "leftover" movements created during musical
performances.
SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013
11am-1pm
BODY MAPS WORKSHOP [room 200]
Tim Miller, Keynote Performer
THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR PEOPLE TO GATHER TOGETHER AND EXPLORE CREATING ORIGINAL
PERFORMANCES. My goal is to share a variety of strategies to create original performances from the
tremendous energies and stories that are present in our lives. Using our own memories and myths as a
jumping off point, we will see where a deep sense of personal history creates performance that jumps out
from our bodies onto the stage or the page. And especially exploring that charged border between our
bodies and society...our personal narratives and our public selves. Please bring your hearts and
brains, hopes and fears. [Maximum participants: 50. To pre-register email: gwyneth@ucla.edu]

Sunday 10-11:30
FAITH AND THE AFTERLIFE [room 208]
Moderator: Al Roberts
Positioning Faith: Testimony as Choreographic Device in American Protestant Dance
Emily Wright, Belhaven University
The purpose of this presentation is to approach the notion of “testimony” as an historical and contemporary
narrative practice in American Protestant Christianity. To that end, this presentation surveys the
development of testimony through an investigation of its etymology in Biblical literature. Further, it
considers the contextual and associated meanings of testimony in historical and contemporary usage.
Finally, this presentation explores testimony as an oral history methodology in contemporary qualitative and
ethnographic research practices. Testimony, as a pervasive and far-reaching tradition in Christian practice,
functions as a point of entry as well as a narrative construct for meaning making in Christian dance. The
intended outcome of this research is to suggest the use of testimony as a point of entry and potential
framework for choreographic analysis of contemporary Christian dances, enabling a more complex and
through reading of this burgeoning subculture.
Remote Choreography and The Ghost: Tupac Shakur’s Holographic Performance (Coachella, 2012)
Priya A. Thomas, York University
In 2012, deceased rapper Tupac Shakur’s hologram performed at the Coachella Music and Arts
Festival in Indio, California. As dumbfounded spectators watched Shakur’s translucent form ascend from a
blackened stage, few suspected his body was an elaborate revenant, a commemorative fantasy built from a
tightly rehearsed choreography. Turning to theoretical frameworks developed in the visual arts, the
performance is understood as the product of physical and spatial patterns that are remotely sensed1 by its
human creators, a commemorative technique whose deeper heritage is indebted to the technologies and
performative practices of nineteenth century American Spiritualism.
Medial Ghosts: The Disappearing Acts of Pina Bausch and Hijikata Tatsumi
Katherine Mezur, Independent Dance Scholar
The study examines how the apparatus of post-death media create re-memories of live works and their
artists, which create touching and strange "figures." The film mediation of two iconic figures of performance,
Pina Bausch, a German tanztheater choreographer/dancer and Hijikata Tatsumi, Japanese butoh cofounder/choreographer,
illuminate the complex and culture-specific process of mediated (re)memory
archives and their resonating affect. I examine sequences from the 3D Film "Pina," and the experimental
films of Hijikata's "Barairo Dansu," "Nikutai no Hanran," and "Hosotan." I focus on how media's apparatus
re-envisions these artists, through corporeal, visual, and virtual technologies, and choreographs empathic
mediation.
CITIZEN BODIES [room 230]
Moderator: Sara Wolf
The Posthuman (and the) Steward: Pick Up America’s choreographic destabilization of the
neoliberal humanist subject
Kelly Klein, Ohio State University
In 2010, four young adults embarked from the Maryland coast to complete the “nation’s first coast-to-coast
roadside litter pick-up.” Pick Up America (PUA) advocated for zero-waste through education, community
arts events, and litter collection. When they reached San Francisco in 2012, PUA had collected 201,678
pounds of litter from 3,672 miles of roadsie. I argue PUA’s performance constitutes two activist figures: the
steward and the posthuman. While the group posits itself as environmental steward, reifying normative
notions of nature as the neoliberal humanist subject’s other, PUA’s choreography also queers the
performers’ spatial and phenomenological orientations, creating space for alternative subjectivities.
Choreographing Rhetoric’s Mobility – Between Dance and Discourse
Michelle LaVigne, University of San Francisco
This paper considers choreography as a concept (in theory and practice) that has something to teach us
about the rhetorical making and moving of thought. The movement of thought is a pressing concern given

the stagnation and polarization that seems to characterize the state of public discourse. Drawing from Bill
T. Jones’ 2007 dance Blind Date, this paper demonstrates the potential for rhetorical movement, the making
of civic thought, amid the certitude of civic discourse. In the end, Blind Dance can teach us about rhetoric.
Its choreographed abstract movements in Blind Date demonstrate how to disrupt the comfort of knowability
in reasoning practices and move thought differently.
pivot point:
durational practice and the space(s) between audience and spectator/who illuminates who?
Alexandra Shilling, UCLA
pivot point is a site-specific, durational occupation that points to, interrupts and illuminates the choreography
of Wilson Plaza (UCLA) and its symmetrical, constructed pathways.
One performer lies supine in the absolute center of the plaza.
Available.
Face to the sky.
Arms and legs extended, clothed in bright fabric.
Inside the frame of architecturally charged spaces, intricate choreographies take place moment by moment
by passersby who must make choices as to how they will traverse the space, where they will pause, if they
will take notice of the quiet female body lying at its center.
Experience pivot point on Saturday April 20, 10am – 4pm, UCLA’s Wilson Plaza
RECORDINGS OF MOVEMENT [room 240]
Moderator: Raquel Monroe
Violence: Performing Convulsive Body Politik
Dr. Naida Zukic, BMCC, CUNY Manhattan
Violence: Performing Convulsive Body Politik is a Butoh performance that foregrounds surrealist aesthetic
of repulsion and abjection as a way of eliciting an ethic of responsibility. The performance combines video
imagery with live movement to highlight visual juxtapositions and political ambiguities that mediate,
negotiate, and intervene in aesthethics of responsibility. The artist embodies obscuring affects of Butoh
consciousness, and experiences the self in movement as a politically charged and institutionally framed
body/medium. The project positions itself amid ideological paradoxes that punctuate the body in revolt
(Kristeva) vis-à-vis theories of subjectivity and politics of human rights violations. The performance/body is
further articulated via Lacan and Baudrillard’s musings on spectacular body/other, which frame “Convulsive
Body Politik” within oneiric ideologies, aesthethic paradoxes, and symbolic closures. The proposed
performance offers Butoh body/movement as a platform for political and aesthethic interrogation of
subjectivity, memory, power, and responsibility.
Somatic Embodiment and Temporal Collapse: Re-defining "choreography" in film theory
Betsy Brandt, Independent Artist
This project examines the word “choreographic” as it relates to film theory. After looking at some examples
of how the word is already applied within cinematic discourse, I then propose a potential definition that
hinges on two criteria: First, we recognize the presence of an “embodied subject” that operates as an entire
somatic system rather than a series of isolated metaphors (the seeing eye, the haptic touch, etc). Second,
we witness temporal systems that are uniquely choreographic, existing at a moment where, through the
actuality of the embodied performance, operations of the past, present, and future can collapse.
Scored Space: Synchroballistic Stereographic Imagery and Body Projections
Marc Miller, Architect | Kim Wilkzak, Independent Artist & Architect
This presentation will document the explorations of how the body creates space through movement.
Inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge and William H. Whyte; the project uses photographic
representations of space as a record of movement. However it differs from the two precedents in that
continuous movement is recorded in two still images. Synchroballistic photographs are compiled and
arrange to create stereoscopic images, recording motion in a variety of methods. The resulting images, or
three-dimensional projections, create unique recordings of how movement describes space.
FAT BLACK MONKEYS:
SYSTEMS THINKING AND CRITICAL CULTURE IN THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF THE OTHER

Roundtable [room 101, first floor]
This roundtable considers primates, big data, obesity, performance, and black speculative fictions in a
conversation to “explore[…]the function of choreography within and beyond the context of dance”. In
discussion with researchers in primatology and cognitive science, art and scholarship in big data and
lethargy, critical theory and performance in black speculative fiction, and the choreography of dancing with
machines, this panel aims to explore the notion of tactical bodies through the perspectives and value
systems of other disciplines and the ways in which choreographic approaches to understanding movement
can be applied to human and nonhuman bodies.
Hybrid Action: Treadmill Dreamtime, running in place
Grisha Coleman, Arizona State University
echo::system is a fusion of art installation, choreographed multi-media performance, and public
engagement that looks to mediate meaningful connections between humans and our environments. Gym
treadmills are re-conceived as interactive interfaces for public and performers to ‘take a walk’ - emphasizing
an embodied experience of navigation through mediated landscapes of dynamic, geo-located, data [e.g.
CO2 levels or median family income] to reveal the invisible, disembodied, abstracted information in a highly
physical, sensory, event. In performed choreography, these mechanically controlled systems for assisted,
enhanced and monitored walking references the walkabout, enacted as a rite-of-passage for indigenous
people of central Australia, traveling on foot, navigating with the learned knowledge of dance and song to
orient them geographically, historically, and cosmologically.
Tentacles, Flesh and the Possibility of Human Interpenetration:
Attraction and Revulsion in Octavia Bulter’s Dawn
Stephanie Batiste, University of California at Santa Barbara
A choreography of emotion, distance, embodiment, and connection pervades Octavia Butler’sDawn. In it
multi-tentacled bodies of aliens present a challenge to black protagonist Lilith’s acceptance of the fact of
human annihilation and the aliens’ offering of otherworldly salvation. The beings, called Oankali,
communicate through touch drawing humans into a pas-de-deux of reaching and avoidance, desire and
revulsion with an alien force destined to appropriate their biology and incontrovertibly alter humanity. I argue
that the physical meetings, partings, and exchanges through which species dance this genetic merging
enacts modes of embodied human interdependence as a form of intelligent, non-rational exchange.
On Lethargy: Un-choreographing Big Data and Obesity
Katherine Behar, Baruch College, CUNY
If a “dancing subject” is an individual, political subject, possessed of a singular body, and disposed to
movement, this paperapproaches “the choreography of non-dancing subjects,” by looking at how big data
and obesity un-choreograph the structure, meaning, and potentialities of such a subject. I recommend
lethargy as an inactive—perhaps inactivist—alternative to dance as expression of subjecthood. Drawing on
Elizabeth Grosz’s politics of imperceptibility to question the big as a political form, I propose a politics of
lethargy, representing a radical slowdown for the choreography of non-dancing subjects, defying spritely
individual ambition, and frustrating neoliberal exchanges of self.
Body Torque as Composite Attention in Non-Dancing Monk
Deborah Forster, UC San Diego
Baboons lack language, material culture and truly collaborative tasks. The complex ‘dance’ of sociocognitive
negotiation is therefore writ in bodies moving in space. I will demonstrate how these dynamics can
be read, in state-space, on multiple timescales and levels of description so that the socio-cognitive
challenge confronting baboons can begin to make sense to the primatologists studying them. I will contrast
this ‘reading’ with a narrative structure of film noir produced in collaboration with media artist, Rachel
Mayeri, as part of her Primate Cinema series. (www.rachelmayeri.com)
Sunday 11:45am-1:15pm
EXPERIENCE AND METHODOLOGY [room 230]
Moderator: Pallavi Sriram

Choreographing Oral Histories
Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
How can the approximation of spoken memory become a site for the precision of contemporary dance
choreography? In the mere act of dancing an oral history, lending a visual manifestation to the "rhythms" of
recollection, is history then relived on a visceral level? By presenting excerpts from my solo, Plainspoken,
along with passages from the paper that elucidates the choreographic process, this multi-media,
performative presentation explores how our oral histories, the experiences we believe to have been
previously lived by other people in our families, actually can, in their unique renditions as danced memory,
perform again in our everyday lives.
From Model to Module - a move towards generative choreography
Rasmus Ölme, DOCH (University of Dance and Circus, Stockholm)
The PhD project ”From Model to Module” researches the relation between technique and choreography by
experimenting with the entwined terms process/product. The practical work is presented in a series called
MODUL and proposes a ”flex stable” relation between two terms often misinterpreted as each other’s
opposite: choreography and improvisation. A module is a finite number of units allowing infinite
reorganization. The initial choreographic exercise of the project has expanded to include an assembled
body and the context it moves through. This modular method identifies the units of a system through
movement analysis, and produces change through reconfiguration.
New trends in the traditional culture education in Japanese school education:
From the perspective of traditional dance in Japan
Yuko Hatano, Kobe Shinwa Women’s University (Japan)
Nihon-buyo (traditional Japanese dance) has never been integrated into the curriculum as a performance
class in the school educational system in Japan. However, according to the Fundamental Law of Education,
in its first amendment in sixty years, “respect for tradition and culture” has been set as a new educational
goal. In this report, trends in the practical implementation of dance at school education sites in Japan from
the perspective of the traditional dance of Japan are examined through an examination of reference works,
interviews and participant observation as a creative dance teacher and a Nihon-buyo natori (accredited
master).
ADVANCING IDENTITY [room 240]
Moderator: Yehuda Sharim
Choreographing the Nation: Bangladesh at the Festival of Asian Arts in Hong Kong
Munjulika Rahman, Northwestern University
In examining the participation of the Bangladeshi national performance troupe at the Festival of Asian Arts
in Hong Kong in the late seventies and early eighties, I investigate the political economy of state-funded
performance events where nations present their “traditional” performances. I use choreographic analysis to
understand the politics of Bangladesh’s participation in this festival within the context of the dominant
political system. I argue that the representation of the Bangladeshi nation through dance performance was
modeled after the practices and paradigms of the dominant nations, and that nationhood is inevitably
associated with the transnational exchange of ideologies, practices, and the circulation of people.
Gendering the Body of the Cuban Revolution
Andrew Martínez, UCLA
In the years following the 1959 Cuban revolution, a new Cuban heritage was formed, one which
emphasized the values and expectations of the citizen to the new state. This paper seeks to convey one
process by which the expression of gender became appropriated by the state in an effort to support the
larger goals of the revolution, which included leveling discrepancies between men and women. This
resulted in practices of gender policing that varied from prescribed dress and behavior codes and violent
“rehabilitations” of homosexuals in labor camps, to nuanced legislation and hiring practices in the work
place.

Our Problems With No Names:
Confronting 'Corporeal Double Consciousness' and Demanding Erotic Democracy
Carl Schottmiller, UCLA
The third most prevalent "psychological disorder" in the United States, Social Anxiety Disorder affects
millions of people globally. The American Psychiatric Association defines social phobia as, "the persistent
fear of one or more social or performance situations." While the Western Psychiatric establishment defines
social phobia as a “mental illness,” I suggest that existing medial evidence actually proves that social phobia
originates and functions as a corporeal response to social violence and trauma. Combining psychiatric
methods for autoethnographic data collection with theories of affect, corporeality, and phenomenology, I
explore how the medicalization of social phobia as an essentialized subjectivity normalizes violent social
traumas and demonizes the afflicted.
ARCHITECTURE ENVIRONMENT MUSEUM [room 101]
Moderator: Judith Hamera
What does dancing in the museum do? – The case study of Steve Paxton’s dance pieces in MoMA
Ayano Oride, New York University
“What does dancing in the museum do?” investigates the burgeoning phenomenon that seeks to capture
performance art captured in the institution of the museum. This paper will use as its case study the
performance pieces by Steve Paxton that took place as part of Some Sweet Day at the Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) in New York City. For this event, Paxton and 42 performers revived his two pieces, Satisfyin
Lover (1967) and State (1968) in the MoMA’s Atrium. Employing Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, I will discuss the implications of staging dance in a museum
setting.
The Buildings Got Up and Danced Through the City: Towards an Architectural Choreography
Zachary Tate Porter, Georgia Institute of Technology
This presentation will examine a series of experimental architectural projects in which the buildings are
uprooted from the earth and cast in carefully choreographed, traveling performances. It will be argued that
these nomadic buildings operate as subversive agents in the cities that they inhabit. By analyzing the critical
tactics of these architectural speculations, the presentation will raise a series of questions about the
possibilities and limitations of site-specific choreography: To what extent can a choreographed body be
considered autonomous from the site it occupies? And, to what extent can site-specific choreography
subvert the embedded power structure of a particular site?
Choreography in Landscape Architecture
Kimberly Wilczak, Independent Artist & Architect
“What else might physical thinking look like?” William Forsythe and the Ohio State University developed
Synchronous Objects in response to that question. I applied their object called the VideoAbstraction Tool
(VAT) to develop a contemporary, fluid methodology for working between the disciplines of landscape
architecture and dance. My example project is the Forecourt to the National Archaeological Museum in
Athens, Greece. Here, I used the VAT to analyze the existing design and a modern dance choreographed
from depictions of Ancient Greek dance. The Museum process revealed multiple avenues to use
movement data as foundational design elements and guides.
Sunday 1:15-2pm
DUC 2013-2014 PLANNING SESSION [room 208]
Sunday 2-3pm
KEYNOTE PERFORMANCE: SEX/BODY/SELF * [room 200]
Tim Miller
Sunday 3-4pm
POST PERFORMANCE RECEPTION [GKH Courtyard/Garden Theater]

PRESENTERS’ BIOGRAPHIES
Jennifer Aubrecht is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside. She holds a
B.A. in Dance and English from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and is currently a Gluck Fellow
and a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UCR. A certified yoga instructor, Aubrecht's research interests
center around the shifts in the definition of yoga and yoga practice over the past hundred years in relation to
the history of yoga and modern dance. She investigates the histories of appropriation, sanitization, and
commodification present in both yoga and dance while rejoicing in the creative potential of the disciplines.
Stephanie Leigh Batiste is Associate Professor of English and Black Studies at The University of
California at Santa Barbara. Her book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era
African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) focuses on the relationship between power
and identity in black performance cultures that include theater, film, dance, photography, humor, and public
space. Her current research in addresses black performative negotiations of violence in millennial Los
Angeles. Dr. Batiste is also a creative writer and performer. Her choreopoem, Stacks of Obits, considers the
ubiquitous death of black youth on Los Angeles’s streets. sbatiste@english.ucsb.edu
Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp (MFA, CLMA) is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Rose holds a BFA
in Dance from Emerson College and an MFA in Choreography from CalArts. She is the Artistic Director of
inFluxdance, a dance theatre company interested in creating accessible works without boundaries. Rose’s
work has been featured internationally. Her choreography was nominated for the Most Innovative
Choreography Award at the Montreal Fringe 2011 and was voted Best in Festival at the SF Fringe in 2007-
08. From 2006-2011 Rose served as the Head of Dance at UVa. Currently, she is on faculty at Alfred
University and SUNY Brockport.
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York, whose videos, performances, and
interactive installations explore issues in contemporary digital culture. Appearing at festivals, galleries,
performance spaces, screenings and art centers worldwide, her work has been supported by the Franklin
Furnace Fund, the U.S. Consulate General in Leipzig, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Cleveland
Performance Art Festival. Katherine holds an MFAfrom Hunter College (2009), MA from NYU (2006), and
BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000). She is Assistant Professor of New Media
atBaruch College. www.katherinebehar.com; www.disorientalism.net, kb@katherinebehar.com
Melissa Hudson Bell completed her M.F.A. in Experimental Choreography in 2009 and is currently a Ph.D.
candidate in Critical Dance Studies at University of California, Riverside. She has recently worked as an
Associate Professor in the Theatre and Dance Department at Santa Clara University. Her work as a
professional contemporary choreographer and aspiring dance scholar has been devoted to examining the
interplay between food culture and performance culture. Bell is a Gluck <strong>Program</strong> for the Arts Fellow, a
Dean's Distinguished Fellow, a Master's Thesis Research Grant recipient, a Zellerbach Family Foundation
Community Arts Grant recipient and a certified Pilates instructor.
Kelly Bond is a DC-based choreographer and performing artist. Her most recent works include Colony
(2012) in collaboration with Melissa Krodman, Elephant (2010), and Splitting the Difference (2009). In 2008,
she participated in ex.e.r.ce08/6MONTHS1LOCATION—an artistic, educational, and social experiment
directed by Xavier Le Roy at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier. She holds an MA in
European dance-theatre practice from Laban which she attended as a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate
Scholar. She currently teaches at George Washington University and University of Maryland, Baltimore
County.
Krista Bower has a BFA in Dance from Belhaven University, and she is a candidate for an MFA in
Choreography from Jacksonville University. She is a Specialty Instructor of Dance at Belhaven University
and is the owner of the Yazoo City School of Dance. In 2008, Krista co-founded Front Porch Dance, a
contemporary dance company based in Jackson, MS. She continues to perform and create work for the
company. Krista was the administrator for the USA International Ballet Competition Dance School and
Teachers Workshop in 2010, and she was recently awarded a Performing Arts Fellowship from the
Mississippi Arts Commission.
Gabriele Brandstetter, Professor of Theater and Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Brandstetter’s
research focus is on: History and aesthetics of dance from the 18 th century until today, theatre and dance of
the avant-garde; contemporary theatre and dance, performance, theatricality and gender differences;

concepts of body, movement and image. Since 2007 she has been co-director of the International Centre
“Interweaving performance studies.” Publications (selection): Tanz-Lektüren. Körperbilder und Raufiguren
der Avantgarde (1995; by a third part extended ed. 2013); Bild-Sprung. TanzTheaterBewegung im Wechsel
der Medien (2005); Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft. Modellanalysen zu Pina Bauschs ‚Sacre du
Printemps‛ (2007); Schwarm(E)Motion. Bewegung zwischen Affekt und Masse (2007); Tanz als
Anthropologie (2007); Prognosen über Bewegungen (2009); Improvisieren. Paradoxien des
Unvorhersehbaren. Kunst - Medien – Praxis (2010); Notationen und choreographisches Denken (2010);
Theater ohne Fluchtpunkt. Das Erbe Adolphe Appias. Szenographie und Choreographie im
zeitgenössischen Theater (2010); Genie – Virtuose – Dilettant. Konfigurationen romantischer
Schöpfungsästhetik, (2011); Dance [And] Theory (2013).
Betsy Brandt currently teaches dance history and technique for St. Louis University and Webster
University, with additional upcoming appointments at Lindenwood University and Washington University in
St. Louis in the Fall of 2013. She received her MFA from University of Illinois: Urbana Champaign in 2012,
where she also worked as a Teaching Assistant and Adjunct Faculty. Previously, she was the Co-Artistic
and Development Director of the aTrek Dance Collective in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked in arts
administration and program development with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Betsy received her
BA in Dance and Political History from Kenyon College.
Claudia Brazzale received a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA’s World, Arts & Cultures
department and a Master in Performance Studies from New York University. An AAUW Postdoctoral Fellow
alumna, Brazzale has held positions as a Global Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers
University; as a Visiting Lecturer at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University; and the Women’s
and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University. Claudia is a Lecturer in the Drama, Dance and
Performance Studies Department at Liverpool Hope University.
Bonnie Brooks is a tenured associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. She chaired the Dance
Department from Fall, 1999-Spring, 2011. During that period she co-curated the Dance Center’s
contemporary dance presenting series. On sabbatical during the 2011-2012 academic year, she was
Legacy Fellow of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. Recent scholarly papers include "Queering
Cunningham," for the 2012 CORD Special Topics conference on queer dance. Brooks was visiting
assistant professor in the World Arts & Cultures Department at UCLA (1996-99), and has held numerous
administrative posts in the dance field. She holds an MA in English from George Mason University.
Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who works in social practice, wearable electronics and intersectional
analysis. She is a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California and a
member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD, an MA in
Communication from the European Graduate School and a BS in Computer Science from Florida
International University. Her book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities was published by
Atropos Press in 2012. Recent publications include Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, with Barbara Fornssler,
from Atropos Press, “I am Transreal”, in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation from Seal Press and
“Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study” in Code Drift from CTheory.
Peter Carpenter has dedicated the majority of his career to excavating relationships between dance and
social justice. His current choreographic project—a cycle of dances under the umbrella title Rituals
of Abundance for Lean Times—critiques socially constructed myths of scarcity in relationship to his own
processes as a dancemaker. His body of work unpacks relationships between representational strategies
and performance frame—recognizing the potent entanglements between concert dances and discourses of
the civic. Carpenter is an Associate Professor at the Dance Center of Columbia College where he teaches
courses in composition, and cultural/historical perspectives on dance.
Gerald Casel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at California State University, Long Beach
and Artistic Director of GERALDCASELDANCE. Casel holds a BFA from The Juilliard School and an MFA
from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee assisted by the Advanced Opportunity <strong>Program</strong> Fellowship. He
received a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for Sustained Achievement for his work with
Stephen Petronio, Lar Lubovitch, Zvi Gotheiner and Stanley Love. He has served on the faculty of Palucca
Hochschule für Tanz Dresden and NYU Tisch School of the Arts where he was awarded the David Payne
Carter Award for Teaching Excellence.

I-Wen Chang is a Culture and Performance Ph.D. candidate in the University of California, Los Angeles.
Originally from Taiwan, she holds a MA degree in Art Theory and Criticism from the Taipei National
University of the Arts. She has been writing about dance for the Performing Arts Review (Taiwan) since
2007. She is the coauthor of the book Pina Bausch (Taipei, 2006). She is currently a correspondent for the
Artist Magazine (Taiwan). At the doctoral level, she turns her research interests to gender, transnationalism,
and national identity. Her dissertation theorizes how people construct identity through the
practice of salsa. iwenchang.tw@gmail.com
Sandra Chatterjee is a postdoctoral research assistant (Department of Art, Music and Dance Studies,
University of Salzburg, FWF project Traversing the Contemporary (pl.): Choreographic Articulations
between European and Indian Dance). She holds a PhD in Culture & Performance (UCLA), where she also
taught as a visiting scholar. She is co-founder of the Post Natyam Collective, an internet-based network of
choreographers/scholars, working in live performance, video, and scholarship. Her professional dance
experience includes solo performances in classical Indian dance as well as solo and collaborative
contemporary performance. She is co-initiator of Integrier-BAR, Munich.
Fan-Ting Cheng is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at
UCLA. She received her BA in theater & drama and art history at National Taiwan University in 2008 and
her MA at NYU’s department of Performance Studies in 2010. She is the founder of Nefes Dance
Workshop, an experimental choreographing group in Taiwan. She is also the winner of the Emerging
Scholar Competition held by Association for Asian Performance in 2012. Her academic interests include
post-colonial choreography, national identity, and gender politics.
Anya Cloud is originally from the wilds of the Northwest and holds an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San
Diego. She currently lives and works in San Diego where she is a Lecturer in Dance at CSU San Marcos.
Anya teaches contact improvisation nationally, is a member of LIVEpractice, performs with Leslie Seiters,
and co-directs “The Wrecking Crew Dance Company” with Jes Mullette. She is currently working with Karen
Schaffman and Mary Reich on The Fantasy Project. Engagement, through liveness, range, anatomy,
relationships, risk, and the unimaginable, is central to Anya’s artistry. (www.anyacloud.com)
Grisha Coleman is an Assistant Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media at the School of
Arts, Media and Engineering and the School of Dance at Arizona State University. A dancer, composer and
choreographer in performance and experiential media systems, she is therecipient of a 2012 National
Endowment for the Arts in Media grant for the development of her current project, echo::system, recently
presented at ISEA 2013, ArtxScience in Los Angeles and the New Media Art Triennial at the National Art
Museum in Beijing, China. An invited research fellow/artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon University's
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry [2008], she was commissioned by the Robotics Institute at CMU to create a
public, site-specific robot in Pittsburgh's downtown. Reach! Robot, a public sound sculpture, a kinetic
installation and a domain for public interaction and participation inspired by the conduction techniques of
Butch Morris. A graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, with an MFA in Composition and
Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, she danced as a member of the acclaimed dance
company Urban Bush Women [1990-1994], and subsequently founded the music performance group
HOTMOUTH, which toured extensively nationally and internationally, and was nominated for a 1998 NYC
Drama Desk Award for "Most Unique Theatrical Experience." She is a member of the Board of Directors for
the Society of Dance History Scholars. www.echo-system.org
Colleen Culley, MA, CLMA, RSME, MFA Candidate, is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, holds a
Masters in Liberal Studies and is currently pursuing an MFA in Dance at SUNY Brockport. In 2007 she
founded Move into Greatness, Inc. and teaches embodied non-verbal communication practices at the
Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. She recently became faculty at Integrated
Movement Studies.
Alison D'Amato is a researcher, choreographer, and performer currently working on a PhD in UCLA's
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where her work focuses on dance notational and scoring
practices. She holds an MA in European Dance Theater Practice from Laban in London (for which she was
awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship) and a BA in Philosophy from Haverford College. Her
choreographic work has been presented widely in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, the UK, and
Poland. Her writing on performance can be found in Choreographic Practices, itch dance journal, and
Native Strategies.

Owen David is a dance artist based on Columbus, OH, where he is an M.F.A. candidate in Dance & New
Media at The Ohio State University. Prior to pursuing graduate studies, he worked as a freelance dancer
and full-time arts administrator in NYC, last serving as an analyst in the Cultural Institutions & Libraries Unit
of the NYC Office of Management & Budget. As a dancer, his credits include performances at the Wexner
Center for the Arts, the Tate Modern, the Watermill Center, Dance New Amsterdam, and Exit Art. He holds
a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University.
Jenna M. Delgado, M.A. University of California, at Los Angeles. Jenna designs collaborative multi media
art projects for youth throughout Southern California. Since 1991, her projects have focused on theater
education, media literacy, HIV/AIDS prevention, identity, community development, and social change. As a
Ph.D. candidate in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, Jenna researches the pedagogical
tactics of community practices; critically analyzes disciplinary negotiations of subjectivity and aesthetic
hierarchies; and theorizes the relationship between ethics of power, assessment priorities, and efficacy.
Her commitment to this work is in illuminating the pathways for marginalized youth to assert themselves as
viable cultural producers within a cultural landscape actively operating to exclude them.
jennadelgado@ucla.edu
Born in Boston, Los Angeles-based artist Veronique d'Entremont explores and invents alternative
processes for working with materials, particularly those materials which have the potential for physical
transformation. Through her current work in sculpture and writing, Veronique seeks to better understand
the ways in which we are shaped by the architectural, social and personal spaces we inhabit, and how we
continue to reshape these spaces. Veronique received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and
received her MFA from UCLA in 2012. She is the recipient of a Hoyt Scholarship, a Dondis Travel
Fellowship and a Joan Mitchell MFA grant.
Dino Dinco is a performance art curator and maker, a director of film and theater and a polydisciplinary
artist. He is currently at work on a book focusing on contemporary performance art practice, thinking and
scholarship in major art centers along the West Coast of North America from Vancouver to Tijuana. For the
year 2011 - 2012, Dinco was the Performance Art Curator in Residence at Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions / LACE. His first full-length documentary, Homeboy, explored the lives of gay Latino men who
were in gangs. The film premiered at OUTFEST 2012 in Los Angeles. www.dinodinco.com @thatdinodinco
duskin drum was made by and by the forest and the sea and the people; duskin is part of the making. Born
on a small forested island in the Salish Sea, duskin’s work circulates around and through practices of
ecological tuning. He is particularly interested in the politics of anthropogenic climate changed, social
transformation through collective practices, and more than human performances. His current research and
performance practice focuses on ecological philosophy, and activist performances of environmental and
ecological solidarity. duskin drum is in the Performance Studies Phd program at the University of California,
Davis.
Deborah Forster, at the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego, works as a behavioral ecologist
turned cognitive scientist, Forster studies social complexity and distributed cognition in olive baboons in
East Africa. Side stepping this trajectory for a decade, Forster fostered collaborations with car designers,
artists, architects, and movement practitioners - the nature of embodied cognition in complex social
interactions remaining the constant element throughout. forstermobu@gmail.com
A seminal figure in the history of dance, performance, and body-based practices, Simone Forti (b. 1935
Florence, Italy) has been at the forefront of artistic investigations relating to movement improvisation. Forti
will discuss her archival work with an eye towards facilitating the continued performances in major
museums and art venues of her Dance Constructions of the early 1960s.
Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of World
Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Her research areas include dance history and theory, choreographic
analysis, and corporeality. She is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary
American Dance (University of California Press, 1986), Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of
Story and Desire (Indiana University Press, 1996), Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised
Choreography of Richard Bull (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), and Choreographing Empathy:
Kinesthesia in Performance (Routledge, 2011). She is also the editor of three anthologies: Choreographing
History (University of Indiana Press, 1995), Corporealities (Routledge, 1996), and Worlding Dance

(Palgrave, 2009).
Dan Froot is a producer, director, composer, writer, and musician. Froot will be discussing his production
choreography for Who's Hungry? a project that weaves together the stories of five homeless and/or hungry
residents of Santa Monica CA into an evening of adult puppet theater. This is a collaboration between
producer/writer Dan Froot, puppet artist/director Dan Hurlin, and composer Amy Denio.
Doran George is a scholar and artist completing a doctorate at UCLA on ‘Somatics’ in contemporary
dance. He has been published in dance, film, and art journals and art publications. Doran has chaired
academic conferences, presented numerous symposia, and teaches in universities, art colleges, and
professional dance. He has been funded by: L.A. Cultural Affairs, London Arts Board, Arts Council of
England, British Council, Finnish Arts Council and others. Doran has danced for various choreographers,
works as a professional mentor, and leads community projects. Doran trained at the European Dance
Development Center (NL) and completed a Feminist Performance MA at Bristol University (U.K.)
Cristina Goletti trained at the London Contemporary Dance School and has been dancing and teaching
across Europe, Mexico, Japan and the USA. She is the co-founder of Legitimate Bodies Dance Company,
the company in residence at Birr Theatre and Arts Centre. Recent awards include “DanceWEB European
Scholarship” and several awards from The Irish Arts Council. She is the director of I.F. O.N.L.Y., a festival
dedicated to dance solos in Ireland and a third year MFA candidate at University of Colorado, Boulder.
Cristina has presented at CORD 2011, SDHS 2011 and The Arts and Humanities 2012 conferences.
Judith Hamera is Professor of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. Her article, “The Labors of
Michael Jackson”(PMLA, October, 2012), is the first publication from her current book project, “Unfinished
Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization.” Her most
recent book is Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850 – 1970 (U of
Michigan Press, 2012), which argues that the perceptual and rhetoric logics of the theatre are crucial to
understanding the tank’s importance and popularity. Other books include Dancing Communities:
Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011/2007), winner of the
National Communication Association Ethnography Division’s award for <strong>Book</strong> of the Year; Opening Acts:
Performance In/As Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (Sage, 2006); and co-edited volumes: The
Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, with Alfred Bendixen (2009), and the Sage Handbook of
Performance Studies (2006), with D. Soyini Madison.
Rennie Harris was born and raised in an African-American community in North Philadelphia. Dr. Harris has
been teaching workshops and classes at universities around the country and is a powerful spokesperson for
the significance of "street" origins in any dance style. In 1992 Harris founded Rennie Harris Puremovement,
a hip hop dance company dedicated to preserving and disseminating hip hop culture through workshops,
classes, hip-hop history lecture demonstrations, long term residencies, mentoring programs and public
performances. Harris will discuss his views on the sustainability of the dance company structure in the
current cultural economy, putting these observations into dialogue with his ongoing work in U.S. academic
dance programs.
Yuko Hatano is a professor at Kobe Shinwa Women’s University in Japan. She teaches dance and
expressive movement for students preparing to be teachers. She received a MA degree from Nara
Women's University in Japan in 1982. She is a member of the Japanese Society for Dance Research,
Japanese Society of Physical Education, Japanese Society of Sports Education, and Japanese Olympic
Academy. She has a position in the Japanese Association of Instructional Materials. Hatano was a visiting
scholar in the Dance Department at UCLA during 1992-93. She performed at the Ethiopian National Theater
during Japan Week in 1999.
Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Ph.D., is a scholar, creator and performer whose interdisciplinary research and
practice engages the fields of performance, dance and theatre studies, ethnomusicology, experimental and
community arts, Mexican studies, and feminist studies. She is a professor at the University of California,
teaching in the Departments of Music, Theater and Dance. Between 1983 and 1994 she had a successful
career as a stage actress and performer in the UK. Ruth’s publications include: Embodying Mexico:
Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance (OUP); Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography,
Identity (University of Illinois Press); and Creativity/ Memory/ History: Contemporary Performance in Mexico
(forthcoming).

EJ Hill lives and works in Los Angeles. Much of his work incorporates his own body, exploring its physical
and psychological properties, their limitations, and their roles in cultural signification. Recent exhibitions
include: A Romantic Measure at Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), Young Performers Series in
collaboration with Collin Pressler as part of Industry of the Ordinary’s Sic Transit Gloria Mundi at the
Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago), and MFA 2013 Exhibition at UCLA (Los Angeles). EJ was a 2010
resident of ACRE (Steuben/Chicago) and a 2012 American Austrian Foundation for Fine Arts Fellow
(Salzburg). He earned a BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011 and is a current MFA candidate at
UCLA. He is represented by The Mission Projects in Chicago.
Monika Jaeckel lives and works in Berlin, Germany. 2002, MA European Media (Stuttgart,
Germany/Portsmouth, UK). Field of work: performance and theory. Work practices: performance, research
and writing. (www.delegate-perception.net; www.mindgap.org/portfolio)
Dr. Jill Nunes Jensen instructs courses in dance history, appreciation, and ballet technique in the dance
department of Loyola Marymount University, for the L.E.A.P <strong>Program</strong> of Saint Mary’s College and the El
Camino College Department of Fine Arts. Currently she serves on the Executive Board of the Society of
Dance History Scholars (SDHS) as Corresponding Secretary. Her research on Alonzo King LINES Ballet
has been published in Jennifer Fisher and Anthony Shay’s When Men Dance (Oxford University Press),
Dance Chronicle (Routledge, Taylor & Francis), and Theatre Survey (Cambridge) while she is developing a
book-length manuscript on King and the company.
Areum Jeong is a doctoral candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at University of California, Los
Angeles. In 2008, she graduated from New York University with a M.A. in Performance Studies. Her
dissertation will explore national identificatory strategies that mine practices of visual media and processes
of cultural translation in live performances.
Thomas Kampe works internationally as a performance maker and educator. Thomas is a practitioner of
The Feldenkrais Method ® which forms a foundation for his teaching, research and artistic practice. He
works as Senior Lecturer for Movement for Actors at Bath Spa University, and was Associate Professor for
Dance at London Metropolitan University between 2002 and 2012. Thomas’ trans-disciplinary research is
driven by an interest in collaborative practice, embodied cognition, social inclusion and the politics of
subversive embodiment.
Patrick Keilty is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Instructor in the Bonham Centre for
Sexual Diversity at the University of Toronto. His writing examines and critiques culture and technology,
visual culture, digital culture, metadata, and databases, with particular interest in feminist and queer
engagements with electronic technology.
After graduating from Wesleyan University with honors in Dance and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies,
Kelly Klein co-founded the environmental nonprofit initiative Pick Up America, which performed the nation’s
first coast-to-coast roadside litter pick-up and advocated for zero-waste. Her doctoral work at The Ohio
State University is centered on somatic pedagogy, subversive performance, and activism in a cross-cultural
framework and has been supported by the Mershon Center, the Vera J. Blaine Special Project Fund, the
Karen A. Bell Dance Fund, and the 2012 International Award for Visual/Performing Arts. She will be
conducting fieldwork on activist performance throughout India this autumn.
Melissa Krodman is a Philadelphia-based performing artist and deviser of original, experimental theatre
and dance. She co-choreographed Colony with Kelly Bond (2012), and was a deviser and performer of
Bond’s piece Elephant (2010). Melissa has created works both as a solo artist and in ensembles with
Applied Mechanics, Happenstance Theater, and banished? productions. She is currently a scholarship
student in the 2011–2013 Pig Iron Theatre Company’s School for Advanced Performance Training studying
Lecoq-based ensemble devising, movement, improvisation, and voice.
Larry Lavender is professor of dance and faculty fellow in the Lloyd International Honors College at the
University of North Carolina Greensboro. Larry teaches courses in choreography, dance history and
criticism, creativity theories, performance art, and critical animal studies in the arts. He publishes/presents
on post-traditional choreography pedagogy in national and international forums, and creates dances and
other performance works in/for/with both proscenium and real-world sites. His paper on “patriarchal
dualisms in dance” will be presented at the 2013 NDEO conference in Miami. Larry works professionally

with the Montreal Danse Choreographic Research Workshop as a choreographic mentor and dance
dramaturge.
Michelle LaVigne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Language at the University
of San Francisco. She teaches classes on rhetoric and dance that foster connections between rhetorical
theory and performance practices. Currently, Ms. LaVigne’s research program investigates how the
immobility of public reason calls us to practices and theories of bodily movement in order to locate new
vernaculars and methods that can move reason forward.
Sarah Leddy, CLMA, MFA, University of California, at Los Angeles. Sarah Leddy is a Los Angeles-based
choreographer, teaching artist and facilitator who designs and implements movement experiences for young
people within the contexts of community arts organizations and public school systems. She has worked as
an Artist Mentor and Facilitator at Will Power to Youth, taught creative movement at Inner City Arts, in the
L.A. Public Schools will Arts Prototype and MUV Dance and Yoga and through LACMA’s NexGen project.
She also coaches classroom teachers in how to integrate movement into their teaching practice. Sarah
holds an M.F.A. from the Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance. sleddy@ucla.edu
Having spent many years dancing and choreographing, an understanding of movement and bodies in space
is integral to the way Sophie Lee thinks about art objects. Her work is centered around painting, but
includes sculpture and installation. Her sculptural work is motivated by the desire to make paintings that
incorporate the architecture of the room and the body of the viewer. She has a BA from Mills College and an
MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Human
Resources, The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, Beacon Arts Building, and Commonwealth and
Council. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
André Lepecki is Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts,
New York University. Doctoral degree from NYU. Main areas of research: critical dance studies,
performance studies and critical theory, continental philosophy and experimental dance, curatorial studies in
performance, dance and the visual arts from 1950s to contemporaneity. Edited Publications: Dance (2012),
Planes of Composition: dance, theory and the global (2009, with Jenn Joy), The Senses in Performance
(2007 with Sally Banes), Of the Presence of the Body (2004). Single authored: Exhausting Dance:
performance and the politics of movement (2006).
Denise Leto is a poet, writer, and Senior Editor at UC Berkeley. She was a Fellow at the University of
Michigan’s Symposium on Movement, Somatics, and Writing; a Visiting Artist at the University of New
Mexico’s Disability Poetics <strong>Conference</strong>; and a Fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artist <strong>Program</strong>. Waveform, a
collaboration in poetry with Amber DiPietra, was published by Kenning Editions. Her latest collaborative
book, from the multigenre production Your Body is Not a Shark, is out from Northbeach Press. She has
presented work at “Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing” at UCSC and “Feminist
Embodiment, Somatics, and Disability Poetics.”
Prior to receiving her BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase (1994), Maggie Leung, first year PhD student in
Theatre Studies at University of Warwick, UK. Current research endeavors to construct a history of ballroom
dance in Hong Kong and examine how the everyday aesthetic practices of the public change the city
landscape in the course of time.
Mika Lior holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She has perfomed with NY companies LAVA,
Philippa Kaye Company, Rujeko Dumbutshena and Raizes do Brasil; Capoeira Brooklyn, toured with
Zimbabwean choreographer Gibson Muriva and featured in Maria Isabel Rondon’s acclaimed “Barravento”.
Cofounder of the arts incubation center espace OSupa and the multi-disciplinary ensemble Blue String
Project, Lior’s choreographic debut, “As Duas” (2009) was dubbed an “awe-inspiring truck-load of fearless
athleticism” by Montreal’s the Hour. Lior began her study of Afro-Brazilian dance in Bahia in 2004 and is
exploring the transmission of ceremonial practices as an M.A. candidate at York University.
Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo has been dancing professionally in NY. She was a member of Bill T. Jones/Arnie
Zane Dance Company (1993-1999) and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (1999-2002). She
has also danced with the Liz Gerring Dance Company, The Metropolitan Opera and the Salzburg Opera
Festival. Articles about her dance career can be seen in Dance Magazine and Ballettanz. Ms. LeBlanc has
continued her work with Bill T. Jones in the restaging of his pieces at universities around the country.
Currently she is a full-time faculty member at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

Andrew Martínez studies Culture and Performance at UCLA. His research seeks to convey the way
choreographing of national identity is made material through the example of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba as
a repository of 1959 revolutionary conditions. He is interested in the ways artistic practice can uphold,
critique, or reinscribe national ideologies. He was recently awarded the Elaine Klein Krown Fine Arts
Scholarship. This summer he voyages to Cuba for fieldwork, and then to Brazil as a research assistant with
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He delights in taking ballet class and playing the piano.
Victoria Mateos de Manuel, Bachelor´s degree in Philosophy, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and
Master´s degree in Politics and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, has a FPU Research and
Teaching Fellowship in the Philosophy Institute of the Spanish National Scientific Research Council (CSIC).
She is working on a Ph.D. about dance philosophy from a feminist queer perspective with the study case of
flamenco.
Liz Maxwell is Associate Professor of Dance and Somatics at Chapman University in southern California.
She specializes in modern dance techniques and repertory, dance history, choreography, and somatic
disciplines and has taught at universities including CalArts, LMU, CSULB, Pomona, UC Riverside, CalPoly-
Pomona among others. In New York, she danced with many companies including those of Lucinda Childs,
Neil Greenberg, Elisa Monte, Bill Young, Ton Simons, Donald Byrd, and Laura Dean. Maxwell is both a
Registered Somatic Movement Educator and a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst. She received
a BFA from The Juilliard School and an MFA from the University of Washington.
A Tsongas Scholar, winner of multiple awards, as well as having works published in Art From Intuition, by
Dean Nimmer, Angela McGuire graduated with honors and distinction in 2011 with her BFA in painting
from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her works, primarily two dimensional, have been
demonstrations of the perception of space; as space is only perceived when a subject describes it. By
embracing the contradictions between the slippage of logic, perception and emotion, she has worked to
signify things that are not actually there and calls attention to and away from the axiomatic space she is
presenting.
Olive Mckeon is a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Kimberley McKinson received her BA in Cultural and Social
Anthropology from Stanford University. She is currently a second year doctoral student in the University of
California, Irvine’s Department of Anthropology. Kimberley’s research interests include the relationship
between crime, security and movement as well as urban security architecture and design in Kingston. As a
dancer and choreographer Kimberley also engages her anthropological ideas and questions through
movement. She was trained in classical ballet in Kingston. Today however, her movement aesthetic
represents a constant dialogue between modern practice and her inherited Afro-Caribbean traditions.
Katherine Mezur is a dance theatre scholar most recently based at the International Research Center of
the Freie University Berlin, "Interweaving Performance Cultures." She investigates the work of Japanese
women butoh and contemporary dance artists who create work in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, focusing
on issues of gender, migration, and new media. She also works as a performance dramaturg. She holds a
PhD in Theatre and Dance from the University of Hawai'i, Manoa, and is author of Beautiful Boys/Outlaw
Bodies: Devising Female-likeness on the Kabuki Stage and Kawaii: Cute Girl Cultures in Contemporary
Japanese Performance and Media Art. She has taught at the University of Washington Seattle, Cal Arts,
Georgetown University, UC Santa Barbara, and McGill University.
Marc Miller is trained an architect and landscape architect with degrees in fine arts and art history. His
interests are grounded in representation, visualization and physical modeling using both digital and analog
media formats. He is interested in new media and ways of imaging three dimensional space as a byproduct
of human activities. His ongoing project, "Landscape is a Verb" explores the role of slitscan photography as
a means to re-imagine landscapes and movement through space.
Tim Miller is an internationally acclaimed solo performer. Hailed for its humor and passion, Miller's
performance works have delighted and emboldened audiences all over the world at such prestigious
venues as Yale Repertory Theatre, the London Institute of Contemporary Art, the Walker Art Center, Actors
Theatre of Louisville and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival. He is the author of the books
SHIRTS & SKIN, BODY BLOWS, and 1001 BEDS, an anthology of his performances and essays, which
won the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for best book in Drama-Theatre. Miller has taught performance at

UCLA, NYU and the Claremont School of Theology. He is a co-founder of two of the most influential
performance spaces in the United States: Performance Space 122 on Manhattan's Lower East Side and
Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA. Since 1999, Miller has focused his creative and
political work on marriage equality and addressing the injustices facing lesbian and gay couples in America.
Glory Box and US are funny, sexy, and politically charged explorations of same-sex marriage and the
struggle for immigration rights for lesbian and gay bi-national couples. They recount the trials Miller has
been forced to undergo in trying to keep his Australian partner in the United States. Says Miller, "I want the
pieces to conjure for the audience a site for the placing of memories, hopes, and dreams of gay people's
extraordinary potential for love." After a nine-year stint in New York City, in 1987 Miller returned home to
Los Angeles, California where he was born and raised. www.TimMillerPerformer.com
Zac Monday’s practice centers on the possibility of interaction between people and objects. Compelled by
the impact of touch, he wants us to be unafraid and unembarrassed to engage one another. In his series of
performances, Monday’s cast of characters don vibrant, ornate, fantastical hand-crocheted costumes to
present different scenarios around gallery spaces. Enacted by performers, these figures call attention to
architectural moments, emotional expectations, and the psychogeographic space of the museum. They
animate the building with mysterious, playful, and haunting physical forms that dawdle, crawl, and linger,
encouraging us to be unselfconscious, curious, and brave in our experience of them, as well as ask us to
consider our role within an art space. Performances take place without set times, bringing an element of
spontaneity and the unexpected to museumgoers’ experiences.
Raquel Monroe (Ph.D., UCLA) is an Assistant Professor in Dance at Columbia College Chicago. Her
current scholarship and performance work explores the performative relationship between nostalgia and
mobility in African American communities. She specifically investigates the performance and
representations of black female sexualities, the intersection between social mobility and activism in black
communities, and performance ethnography. Monroe is published in the Journal of Pan African Studies and
E. Patrick Johnson’s and Ramón Rivera-Severa’s solo/black/woman: Performing Black Feminisms,
(Northwestern University Press 2013, forthcoming), and Melissa Blanco-Borreli’s Mediated Moves: A
Popular Screen Dance Reader (Oxford University Press 2013, forthcoming). She serves on the board for
the Society of Dance History Scholars, is a member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, and an
enthusiastic Yoga instructor.
Prior to joining the Dance Department at the University of Kansas as Assistant Professor in 2012, James
Moreno was Visiting Professor of Dance at the University of Panamá in Panamá City, Panamá. He was
also Visiting Guest Artist at the National School of Dance of Panamá. Moreno holds a PhD in Performance
Studies from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender Studies. He is a Fulbright Scholar
(2011-12) and McNair Scholar (2004-05). His scholarship examines how José Limón’s staging of non-white
and gender-queer bodies re-shaped the nexus of whiteness and heteronormativity at the foundation of postwar
“American” identity.
Meena Murugesan, University of California, at Los Angeles. Meena is a choreographer, dancer, filmmaker,
and community arts facilitator. She is also currently a Masters in Fine Arts student in dance at UCLA, World
Arts and Cultures / Dance. As a community arts facilitator, she has designed and implemented numerous
art interventions in diverse communities in her hometown, Montréal, as well as Toronto, Rio de Janeiro and
Niamey. She has collaborated with South Asian girls, criminalized women both in and out of prison, Sri
Lankan Tamil refugees, communities of color, and youth in low-income neighborhoods. She is constantly
inspired and challenged by the complex negotiations involved in the ongoing attempt to create nonhierarchal,
collaborative relationships. Some of Meena’s primary areas of study at UCLA are the critical
histories of bharata natyam, improvisation, the representation of race in performance, and community
collaborations. murugesan.meena@gmail.com
Megan Nicely is an artist/scholar working at the intersections of Japanese butoh and contemporary dance.
She holds an MFA from Mills and has performed her solo and group choreographic work in the US, UK, and
Europe. She recently completed her PhD in performance studies at New York University focusing on post-
60s experimental dance and philosophy, and has published in Performance Research, TDR, and Movement
Research Journal. She is Assistant Professor in Dance at University of San Francisco, whose program
focuses on the performing arts and social justice.

Erica Ocegueda is a PhD student in Theatre Performance of the Americas at Arizona State University.
She received her MA in Dance History and Criticism and a BA in Theatre and Dance with a Flamenco focus
from the University of New Mexico. She also received a BA in Latin American and Latino Studies from the
University of California, Santa Cruz with an emphasis on Anthropology specifically Mexican folklore. Her
work examines cultural identity and expression through Azteca, Flamenco, and Mexican Folklórico dance
and how it intersects with Chicano/Gitano identity and indigeneity.
Rachel Oliver, originally from Missoula, MT, has performed at venues throughout the country. Currently
dabbling in a little dance cinema, she’s inspired by the human connections and often-unnoticed art of the
everyday. Rachel recently toured an evening length piece, Sticks & Stones, to Boulder and Philadelphia,
with co-choreographer Kate Speer. She has been teaching and choreographing dance for the past 7 years,
enjoying the enthusiasm of dancers of all ages. Rachel graduated with a double major in biochemistry and
dance from Beloit College and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at CU Boulder as an Arts and
Sciences Fellow.
After his career as a freelance dancer in Germany, Belgium, France and Spain, Rasmus Ölme founded, in
2001, his group REFUG in his home country Sweden. Since then he has produced and toured his work
around Sweden and Europe. He also teaches in professional schools (notably PARTS in Brussels and
DOCH in Stockholm), festivals (notably Impuls Tanz in Vienna) and companies (most recently Cullberg
Ballet in Sweden and Ballet National de Marseille in France). IN 2007 Rasmus moved back to Sweden and
since September 2008 Rasmus is doing his PhD in Choreography at DOCH (University of Dance and
Circus, Stockholm).
Ayano Oride is an MA candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on
Steve Paxton, and in 2012, she obtained an MA in Dance Studies from Waseda University in Japan. Her
thesis paper at Waseda University was titled, Steve Paxton’s ‘Material for the Spine’: A Movement System
for the Spine and an Introduction to Improvisation. She is a 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholarship grantee.
Ariel Osterweis is Assistant Professor of Dance at Wayne State University. She earned her Ph.D. in
Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and B.A. in Anthropology at Columbia University. At work on her first
book, tentatively titled, Embodying Virtuosity: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Race and Gender in
Performance, Osterweis also researches contemporary African dance and the disavowal of virtuosity in
feminist and transgender live art and performance. Publications appear in Dance Research Journal, Women
and Performance, e-misférica, and more. She danced professionally with Complexions Contemporary
Ballet, Mia Michaels, and Heidi Latsky, choreographs, and is currently dramaturg for performance artist
Narcissister.
Rebecca Pappas lives in California where her work has been presented at venues including REDCAT and
the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Monster, her most recent evening-length work, uses “creature
vocabularies” to examine Jewish history, shame, and cycles of violence. Monster has been seen in 13 cities
including Singapore and Tallin, Estonia. It is reflective of Pappas’ interest in the body as an archive for
personal and social histories. Pappas has received residencies at Yaddo and Djerassi, and funding from the
UCLA/Mellon Initiative for Research on the Holocaust in American and World Culture. Pappas is a 2013
CHIME recipient and faculty at Pasadena City College.
Cecile Paskett is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Utah, where she is a doctoral student in
the Department of Communication. She received her Master of Arts in Communication from the University
of Utah, and currently engages in critical/cultural studies research on issues pertinent to the urban
environment, including surveillance and (re)development projects. Her interdisciplinary academic work also
involves her photographic experience, which utilizes analog techniques, and most recently employed her
small fleet of toy cameras to complete her master's thesis documentary, Eastside/Westside: After-images of
Salt Lake City, which has been exhibited publicly in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Cid Pearlman’s choreography has been presented by numerous venues including Joyce SoHo, Kanuti Gildi
SAAL, the Getty Center, and ODC Theater. From 1991-99, Pearlman was the artistic director of San
Francisco’s Nesting Dolls. In 1999, she relocated to Los Angeles, establishing herself as an independent
choreographer and producer. After completing her MFA in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at
UCLA in 2006, she relocated to Santa Cruz, where she teaches in the Theater Arts Department at UCSC
and the Dance Department at Cabrillo College. In 2009/10 Pearlman was a Fulbright Scholar,

choreographing and teaching dance in Estonia. cidpearlman.org
Trained in various dance methods, physical theater, and other embodiment practices, Sarah Petersen
integrates the actions of spectators and the movement of the objects she creates into the meaning of her
work. Her multidisciplinary practice includes installation, painting, sound, and the production of signs and
signals that others can use to reconsider and intervene in social and architectural space. She holds a BA in
English and BFA in Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and an MFA in Art from CalArts,
earned in 2012. Her work has recently been shown at Venice 6114, Los Angeles, the Hochschule fur
Bildende Kunst, Braunschweig, Germany, and the New Wight Gallery at UCLA. Sarah lives and works in
Los Angeles.
Ryan Platt is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Colorado College. His writing on movement
and media-based arts has appeared in PAJ and Theatre Journal.
Lionel Popkin is a choreographer, performer, and teacher. Popkin will discuss his modular structure
deployed in order to tour his 2009 work, There is an Elephant in this Dance (2009), in which one or more of
the roles can taken on by a local artist depending on the needs and desires of each particular presenter.
Zachary Tate Porter is a Ph.d candidate in Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
He received his Bachelor of Arts and Architecture and his Master of Architecture degrees from the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Porter has published papers on issues related to phenomenology,
representation, and computation in architecture. His current research focuses on the relationship between
architecture and the ground in the twentieth century. In addition to his work as a theorist, Porter continues
to investigate fundamental questions of architecture through the medium of drawing. Images of his work can
be found on at www.ZacharyTatePorter.com.
Meghan Quinlan is a second-year Ph.D. student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. She holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Marymount Manhattan College, and is a Gluck
Fellow and a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UCR. She served as a co-chair for the Dance Under
Construction (DUC) graduate student conference held at UCR in 2012. Her current research focuses on the
medialization, digitization, and dissemination of dance techniques and performances, particularly in the
contexts of Israel, Palestine, and the United States.
Munjulika Rahman’s research is on the history and politics of dance in Bangladesh in relation to sociopolitical
movements in South Asia. She has successfully defended her dissertation from the Department of
Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research interests include nationalism, performance
theory, Hindu mythology, and dance in predominantly Muslim countries. She is trained in Bengali music and
various dance forms.
Anisha Rajesh is an Indian classical dancer, instructor, choreographer and researcher. She is the artistic
director of Houston based Upasana Kalakendra and also the founder of Upasana Foundation for Research
and Cultural Exchange, Inc., a Texas non–profit organization whose mission is to promote and encourage
research in traditional art forms. Anisha is trained in Indian classical dance forms, Bharathanatyam,
Mohiniyattam, Kathakali, Ottanthullal, and in South Indian classical (Carnatic) music. At present she is
undergoing her PhD in Dance at Texas Woman’s University, focusing her research on “Mohiniyattam”, the
female classical solo dance form of Kerala, South India.
Jose Luis Reynoso, a Mexican immigrant, is the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at
Northwestern University. He completed his Ph.D. in Culture and Performance, with a specialization in
Dance Studies, and an M.F.A in Choreography at UCLA. He also holds a M.A. and a B.A. in Psychology
from California State University Los Angeles. His interests include critical theory and pedagogy, the explicit
and implicit politics of choreography, ideologies of artistic identity, and the role of corporeality in knowledge
production. Jose writes and teaches about modern/cotemporary dance in Mexico and the U.S. He has
presented his academic and choreographic work nationally and internationally.
Cristina Rosa is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida State University’s School of Dance. In
May 2013, Rosa will return to Berlin, where she is research fellow at Freie Universität’s International
Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures." Rosa holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from
UCLA and a graduate certificate in Ethnic and Racial Studies and African Culture from Universidade
Federal da Bahia. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled, Swing Nation: Ginga,

Brazilian Bodies and their Choreographies of Identification, which addresses the dynamic interaction across
embodiment, knowledge production, and processes of identification in Brazil.
David Roussève, a choreographer, writer, director, dancer and actor, came to UCLA in 1996. Roussève
will discuss his production organization and partnerships for his latest work STARDUST (World Premiere
January 2014) a coming of age story for the electronic age, that follows an African American gay urban
teenager who- never seen onstage- is present only by the emotion laden tweets and text messages he
sends across disparate performance contexts.
Wendy Rucci is a senior thesis student at New College of Florida, where she majors in Performance
Studies, concentrating in dance methodology and phenomenology. Her background is in contemporary
dance practice, which she analyzes through a theoretical lens informed by phenomenological discourse and
performance theory. She has attended programs abroad such as Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and
Dance and the Gaga Summer Intensive. Wendy is currently a company member with Fuzion Dance
Company, a non-profit modern dance company in Sarasota, Florida.
Sahar Sajadieh is a theatre director, media artist and performance artivist (artist/activist) and scholar, who
was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Sahar has received her Bachelor’s degree in Theatre and Computer
Science from The University of British Columbia and her Master’s from the Performance Studies <strong>Program</strong> at
New York University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at University of
California, Santa Barbara. Sahar is interested in multimedia interdisciplinary experimentation on theater and
performance art. Her main field of research is digital performance, virtual immersive environments and
digital doubles of the body on stage.
Telma João Santos, December 17, 1976. PhD in Mathematics, Calculus of Variations. Many years of
contemporary dance classes, performance and dance laboratories and pursuing a research on movement
analysis using specific mathematical reasoning and dance techniques since 2008. Doing a PhD in
Performative Arts and of the Movement Image, specialyizing in dance. Teaching at the Mathematics
Department of the University of Évora – Portugal since 2000. Aiming to find specific choreographic auto
ethnographic environments, using Maths and Dance as main characters; as well as to create new counter
examples to the Cartesian Dualism, and breaking boundaries between areas of research.
www.telmajoaosantos.com
Singar-Mani, Nalanda-NrityaNipuna, Odissi-Jyoti Kaustavi Sarkar, doctoral student at Ohio State
University, is a dancer, choreographer, dance scholar, and dance educator. She is a national fellow from
India researching on emerging trends of contemporary reconstructions of the classical dance form of Odissi.
Her research combines dance studies, discourse analysis, performance studies and queer theory. She is
committed to embodied acts of social justice, community outreach and leadership. She has toured
extensively as an Odissi dance scholar and performer presiding at conferences in USA, UK, Australia and
Taiwan. Her mentors are Guru Pausali Mukherjee, Guru Ratikant Mohapatra, and Guru Sujata Mohapatra.
Karen Schaffman is a lifelong dancer and devoted collaborator. She earned her Ph.D. in Dance History
and Theory from UC Riverside. She also graduated from the European Dance Development Center in
Holland. Karen is a Professor at CSU San Marcos and teaches at dance festivals and schools
internationally. Her writing is published in Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (Wesleyan
Press), Encounters with Contact Improvisation (Oberlin College), and Contact Quarterly. Her recent
performances include Deborah Hay’s FIRE, a Solo Performance Commissioning Project; BARK, which
premiered for The A.W.A.R.D. Show! (2011); LIVEpractice; and The Fantasy Project. (www.padlwest.org)
Carl Schottmiller is a Doctoral Student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. in Women’s Studies and English from Ohio
University and his M.A. in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research
looks at contemporary drag cultures and emerging socio-cultural changes to the queer art of Camp.
Gwyneth Shanks received a BA in Theatre from Macalester Collage, and her MA in Performance Studies
from New York University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance
Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research is focused on site-specific performance art
and performative acts that engage directly with urban space. She is a dancer and movement artist, and has
performed in venues around Los Angeles, including MOCA and UCLA.

Janet Schroeder is a percussive dance artist, scholar, and teacher, with a focus on tap dance, Appalachian
clogging and body percussion. After five years of intense physical exploration and performance of these
forms with Rhythm in Shoes, a Dayton, Ohio based music and dance company, Janet began her MFA in
Dance at The College at Brockport, SUNY. Janet continues her investigation of these rhythmic dance forms
by creating and presenting choreography as well as taking and teaching classes throughout the U.S. and
Mexico. This fall, Janet will begin her PhD in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University.
Rachael L. Shaw, MFA, CLMA, is currently teaching at the University of Wyoming in the Theatre and
Dance Department. Rachael received her Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Utah, where she also
received a Screendance Certificate. In addition, Rachael has a certification in Laban Movement Analysis.
Before returning to graduate school, Shaw danced professionally with many companies, including Ground
Zero Dance Company, Miki Liszt Dance Company, and inFluxdance. Her live work has been shown at the
University of Utah, Virginia Commonwealth University, in Salt Lake City, UT, in Charlottesville, VA, and in
Puebla, Mexico.
Alexandra Shilling is fully committed to the infinite investigation of movement and its potential to tell stories
and allow us to remember. Her original choreography and experimental films have been presented in New
York, Los Angeles, Munich, Chicago, at the American Dance Festival, on MTV's 9/11 Video Postcards,
among others, both as Artistic Director of alexx makes dances and ann and alexx make dances, bringing
live, multi-media performance to unusual spaces. Shilling co-directs FIELDSHIFT | FURTHER with
interdisciplinary artist Quintan Ana Wikswo. She will complete her MFA in choreography at UCLA's World
Arts & Cultures/Dance department in June 2013. www.AlexxMakesDances.com
Helen Simard is a Montreal based dancer, choreographer, and dance researcher. She holds a BFA in
contemporary dance from Concordia University (2000), and is completing an MA in dance at UQAM. Her
academic research examines the construction and performance of personal and social identity in popular
dance cultures; she is particularly interested in how individuals interact with media representations of their
dance practices. With her artistic research, Helen explores the expressive potential of popular dances and
pedestrian movements by re-contextualizing them into contemporary dance performances. Her
choreographies and performances have presented across Canada, as well as at the South Bank Centre in
London, England.
Pallavi Sririam’s academic research on critical histories of bharata natyam lies at the intersection of various
fields of study; rooted in critical dance studies and extending into cultural history and ethnomusicology.
Through this work she aims to complicate notions of modernity and essentialized constructions of 'third
world' pasts. Pallavi received her Bachelor's of Science at Northwestern University, where she first
articulated her interest in Dance studies. As she continues graduate study at UCLA's WAC/D Department,
she continues her lifelong involvement with bharata natyam as a dancer and choreographer. She also
continues work in arts non-profit and as a freelance web designer.
Kristen Stoeckeler is a PhD student in the Theatre Historiography program at the University of Minnesota.
Alongside her work on Minneapolis strip clubs and exotic dance, her primary areas of research include drag
practices and the production of LGBT community space, as well as performances of identity at the
intersections of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion in the specific context of Istanbul, Turkey. When
Kristen is not studying and conducting research, she is dancing and making theater.
Adrienne Stroik holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside and
a B.A. in Theatre Arts: Dance from the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Her research focuses on the
World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. She examines ways that movement staged inside and locomotion
through the fairgrounds produced bodies and cultural meanings linked to issues of imperial expansion,
cultural ranking, identity politics, city planning, and consumer society. Currently an instructor at Mt. San
Jacinto College, Menifee Valley Campus, Stroik has previously taught at the MSJC, San Jacinto Campus;
the University of California, Long Beach; UCR; and for the Osher program through the UCR Extension.
Michelle T. Summers is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, and her B.F.A. in Ballet
and B.A. in English from Texas Christian University. Her research investigates white Christian embodiment
and dance in the American religious landscape. Summers is an active choreographer, teacher, and dancer
in the Los Angeles area.

Leila Tayeb is a doctoral student in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Her current work centers on music performances in the 2011 Libyan “February Revolution” and her
research interests more broadly include phenomenology, dance studies, feminist and queer theory,
diaspora and "return."
Priya A. Thomas is a PhD candidate at York University researching corporeal morphologies in twentieth
century performance. Trained for 21 years in Bharata Natyam by the primary pupil of Balasaraswati, her
own international performance career was shaped by her dual identity as a dancer and musician. She holds
a BA in Religious Studies from McGill University and an MA in Dance from York. An OGS Doctoral Scholar,
she is the recipient of several research awards including the Lawrence W. Heisey Award for the Fine Arts,
the Iris Garland Award presented by SCDS, and the Evelyn Carnie Rowe Award for Research in Dance.
Raegan Truax is a New York City based durational performance artist who relocated to the Bay Area to
pursue a PhD at Stanford. Truax’s choreographic scores and installations engage and investigate her
concept of the “Misbehaving Body” as a body that acts against a normative figuring of progress and
resilience. Her work has been presented at Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin, The New Museum in
New York City, and The Northern California Performance Platform. Truax holds a B.A. in Creative Writing
from Colorado College; an MA in Performance Studies from NYU; and an MA in Humanities and Social
Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics from Draper Interdisciplinary <strong>Program</strong> at NYU.
Northern California native LaTeesa Joy Walker began her life’s work as a dancer more than twenty years
ago. Joy is currently pursuing her PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis as a Provost’s Fellow. She is a
recognized choreographer/dance educator on both the east and west coasts. Her general research focus
encompasses the fields of dance education and curriculum development with an emphasis on African
American dance. Currently she’s investigating the efficacy of Merce Cunningham’s and Steve Paxton’s
choreographic process chance as a non-human dancer articulates it and exploring the various aesthetic
interpretations of phenomenology for this process. lateesajoywalker.com.
Wang, Ruping is a full time lecture at the Dance Department of Taipei Physical Education College. She
received her MFA from the University of Utah Modern Dance Department and BFA from the Taipei National
University of the Arts. She has been a member of José Limón Dance Company, Metropolitan Opera Ballet,
Mary Anthony Dance Theatre, Martha Graham Dance Company, Repertory Dance Theatre, Taipei
Crossover Dance Company, and Taipei Chamber Ballet, among others. Besides teaching and performing,
Wang also writes regularly for the Performing Arts Review magazine in Taiwan. She has published an Ebook
named NYC Dance Map in 2009.
Margaret Jean Westby’s research and practice explores the moving body’s relationship to digital
technologies and the performativity of all entities in play through a feminist perspective. She is currently
pursuing her PhD at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University
in Montreal, Canada. She has a professional dance background trained at Interlochen Arts Academy,
receiving her Bachelors in Dance and Communication Arts at Marymount Manhattan College in NYC,
followed by her Master of Arts in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University, England. She
has created and collaborated in art performances, installations, and films throughout the United States,
United Kingdom, and Europe.
Kathy Westwater is a New York based choreographer who has pursued experimental dance forms since
1985. Her major works have explored the built environments of landfills and parks (“PARK,” current);
phenomena of war and pain (“Macho,” 2008); and human and animal culture (“twisted, tack, broken,” 2005).
Since 2000, Westwater has been a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College, teaching
improvisation, composition, dancemaking, and dance history. She is on the faculty of Movement Research,
and serves on its Artist Advisory Council. She received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and a BA from
William and Mary where she studied political economy.
Sarah Wilbur is a choreographer-turned academic-hopeful at UCLA's Department of World Arts and
Cultures/Dance. Sarah's dissertation research focuses on the social and institutional politics of dance
making. She would very much like to facilitate critical discussions about invisibilized aspects of
choreographic production for the rest of her life. Sarah is very grateful to this panel of esteemed
choreographers for their commitment to this line of inquiry.

Launching from Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s pioneering work between dance and design, Kimberly
Wilczak researches the theoretical and practical applications of dance and choreography in landscape
architecture. Currently, she investigates contemporary choreographic software to translate movement into
design data. Ms. Wilczak’s background includes ice dance, modern dance, composition, and 7 years of
licensed landscape architectural practice. She aspires to teach design methodology based in the moving
experience of place and choreograph from designed space. Ms. Wilczak holds a Master of Landscape
Architecture from Cornell University and will begin her PhD at The Ohio State University in the fall.
Tara Aisha Willis is a dance artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and currently an M.A. candidate in Performance
Studies, NYU. She is also the <strong>Program</strong> Associate at Movement Research, where she is helping build their
Artists of Color <strong>Program</strong>. After graduating from Barnard with a B.A. in Dance and English/Creative Writing,
she was a Dance Theater Workshop Van Lier Fellow, worked at Joe’s Pub and New York Live Arts, and
became a certified Pilates instructor. Her work has been presented in and around NYC, and she currently
performs in the work of Megan Byrne, Macklin Kowal, and Jillian Sweeney.
Emily Wright, MFA, is Assistant Professor of Dance at Belhaven University and the director of their MFA
program. Ms. Wright has presented her research on contemporary American Protestant dance at
numerous national and international conferences, including the <strong>Congress</strong> on Research in Dance, the
National Dance Education Organization, and the Nordic Forum on Dance Research. Her most recent
publication is a chapter in the dance ethnography text, Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of
Dance (2011). She is currently pursuing further research as a member of the doctoral cohort at Texas
Woman's University Department of Dance in Denton, Texas.
Jia Wu, choreographer, performer, dance filmmaker and dance educator, has been invited to participate in
the Tanztheater 3 Wochen mit Pina Bausch festival in Germany in2008. Her works have been presented in
more than 14 countries. Wu is a founding choreographer of Los Angeles Movement Arts, a collective of
dance, performance, theater, music and multi-media artists committed to artistic collaboration and
innovation. She has been taught in University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley,
American College Dance Festival, Beijing Dance Academy, Beijing Normal University, South China Normal
University, Hunan Normal University and other professional institutions. Jia is currently an Associate
Professor at Saint Mary's College of California in the Performing Arts Department and holds an MFA in
Choreography from UCLA and a BFA in choreography and Performance from Beijing Dance Academy.
Allison Wyper makes live performance that destabilizes the familiar from a feminist, activist perspective to
reveal uncomfortable truths about our everyday lives. An Associate Artist since 2004 of the international
performance company La Pocha Nostra, her work has been seen in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose,
Boston, Chicago, Calgary, Berlin and Perth, Western Australia. Her writing has been published by the
performance journals Itch, Platform, Emergency Index, and by UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women.
Allison holds a BA in Theatre Studies with concentrations in Directing and Visual Art from Emerson College,
and an MFA from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Cheng-Chieh Yu is a choreographer of dance theater works that explore Asian Diaspora issues and
challenges notions of an Asian and Asian-American profile, criss-crossing issues such as gender ascription,
social-political perspectives, cultural boundaries and hybridity. Yu plans to discuss her three year stage and
video dance collaboration with Guangdong Modern Dance Co. (China) & The Jumping Frames Dance
Video Festival (Hong Kong). Yu plans to discuss her three year stage and video dance collaboration with
Guangdong Modern Dance Co. (China) & The Jumping Frames Dance Video Festival (Hong Kong).
www.yudancetheatre.com
Dr. Naida Zukic is a New York-based, Bosnian-born Communication and Performance Studies scholar and
Butoh artist. Zukic’s research develops a critique of photographic representations of violence in the attempt
to formulate new theories of subjectivity, ethics and responsibility. She has recently published on these
topics in Digital Icons, TPQ, and Liminalities. Zukic's digital performances that evoke ethico-aesthetics of
photography, memory, and movement, have been screened internationally. Her most recent performance
work interrogates the question of ethics & responsibility in relationship to: 1) politico-ideological
representations of anonymous violence; 2) fetishist disavowal of its accumulated atrocity.