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Course Description

Summary

Orienting ourselves away from the traditional performance/audience relationship of Western European dance lineages, particularly the human-centric relationships through which performance is typically produced and shared, this course proposes an attunement toward another, expanded audience or web of relations through which to perform. With a critical eye towards what anthropologist Natasha Myers calls “the colonial ecological sensorium” – modes of perception and ways of being in relation shaped by colonial violence, extractive capitalism and human exceptionalism – we will explore the role of creative embodied inquiry in extending ourselves beyond anthropocentric ways of being together and performing in the world across a multiplicity of non/human relationships, desires, energies and agencies. Our investigation will be framed and supported by critical contributions from scholars and artists thinking/moving at the intersections of indigenous rights, sovereignty and kincentric ecologies; crip theory; transqueer ecologies; critical race theory; animacy and new materialism; posthumanism; animal rights; environmental justice, etc. Throughout the course we will talk/feel/move/observe our way through radical reimaginings of ecology in the face of ecological collapse and unravel ontological binaries such as human/non-human, animate/inanimate, living/dead, alive/inert in order to expose the porosity of these terms and what they reveal about governmentality and the management of lands and bodies. This course welcomes students from all disciplines whose research and interests overlap with the subject matter. Please be prepared to participate in movement practices and group dialogue with equal rigor. In addition to reading 1-3 articles per week, students will be asked to develop performance scores, practices and other creative methodologies towards a final shared event or happening; submit one 3-5 page paper and one 5-7 page paper; and collectively assemble a zine of work compiled by the class.