The Unsettling Approaches to Performance Studies
(Reading Group) was torn out of concerns about departmental
courses in relation to racialized modes of knowledge production,
the study group centralizes critical race approaches to
Performance Studies. Some topics include Afro-Pessimism,
Black Optimism / Operations, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical
Indigeneity, Queer of Color Critique, Women of Color Feminism,
Dance Studies, Post-Colonial Caribbean and / or Post-Colonial
Black Atlantic, and Queer and Crip Studies.
2015/2016 PRESENTERS:
Monday November 2nd PFS Forum Lunch
Presenter: Keith Hennessy, on Contact improvisation, queer and
critical race studies.
Monday November 23
Presenter: NAKA dance company
Debby Kajiyama and Jose Navarrete will talk about their
collaboration with Eastside Arts
Alliance and the residents of East Oakland in their project
called The Anastasio Project. The Anastasio
Project is a multidisciplinary public performance work that
kickstarts an investigation of racial profiling, police
brutality, and border violence. Presented in collaboration with
Eastside Arts Alliance.
November 30th
Presenter: Sam Aranke
Sampada Aranke is a graduate of Performance Studies at UC Davis
and Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art
at SFAI. Aranke has been widely published and is currently
working on a manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The
Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
Presentation: Skin to Piss: A Very Brief History of 1970s Black
Conceptual Performance
Stay tuned for talks/ labs presentations from:
WINTER QUARTER 2016:
Feb 12 or Feb. 15-
Presenter: Dana Michel (tentatively confirmed)
Michel’s critically acclaimed work “Yellow Towel” will be showing
at CounterPulse Feb. 13 and Feb. 14, 2016 in San Francisco.
Feb 16:
Presenter: Natasha Myers
Unsettling STS working group
Myers will talk about her work called Ungrid-able Ecologies.
Ungrid-able Ecologies is a research/creation project on the
10,000 year old happening that is an oak savannah in Toronto. She
is developing a sensory/affective/queer/feminist/urban political
ecology in collaboration with movement, film, and sound artists.
Feb 2016
Postcommodity
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised
of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist.
Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and
voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global
market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions,
beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding,
multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that
is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities
and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new
metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within
this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a
constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and
economic processes that are destabilizing communities and
geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural
self-determination with the broader public sphere.
SPRING QUARTER:
Wednesday April 27
Presenter: Brenda Dixon Gottschild 4pm
In partnership with African American & African Studies department
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Professor Emerita of Dance from Temple
University, is a major black dance studies scholars of our time.
To familiarize with Dr. Gottschild’s work, please visit her bio
website at: http://bdixongottschild.com/about/
She will give a talk called “Racing” in “Place”: Dance
Studies & the Academy.”
Below you will resources, including readings and audio recordings
from visiting artists. Feel free to use these resources in your
artistic, pedagogical, and intellectual practices!
Practice is a site where inquiry and technique, ontics and
epistemics, experimentation and formalization, and creativity and
repetition converge. This invites the critical cultivation of
skills that can disturb, stir up, and set into motion the
sedimented relations that make up what and how we know and do.
How might practices be unsettled? What makes a practice
unsettling?
Some topics include Afro-Pessimism, Black Optimism /
Operations, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Indigeneity,
Queer of Color Critique, Women of Color Feminism, Dance Studies,
Post-Colonial Caribbean and / or Post-Colonial Black Atlantic,
and Queer and Crip Studies.
Below you will find resources, including readings and audio
recordings from visiting artists. Feel free to use these
resources in your artistic, pedagogical, and intellectual
practices!
