Talks with affiliated faculty and guests.

Spring 2022 Events

PFS Colloquium featuring micha cardenas’s Poetic Operations

Friday, May 6th, 2022
12:10PM
Zoom:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/4155846088

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. 

Her book Poetic Operations, forthcoming from Duke University Press, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. 

She is co-editor of the book series Queer/Trans/Digital at NYU Press, with Amanda Philips and Bo Ruberg. She is a first-generation Colombian American. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, AI & Society, Scholar & Feminist Online, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, among others.

Contact Improv: Unboxing Soma class and Jam. Class led by Aramo Olaya

Wednesday, April 27th, 2022
5:30PM – 7:00PM
Rm 107
Art Annex

Unboxing Soma: Spirals in the body are related with the peculiarities of the spiraling structure of the human body. This structure can be broken down in three different “boxes”: hips, torso, and head. In the following classes we will focus in each of this boxes to discover their spiraling properties in movement and contact. Through this practice we will train spherical orientation, weight-sharing, and diverse qualities of touch and structure awareness. Central box: The PELVIS 

We would like to start together so please arrive on time if you can, later if you need to!

Proof of vaccination and masks are required to enter UC Davis facilities. You also have to bring the daily symptoms survey with you. Bring also your body. That will do.

map here, off-campus info here.

PFS Friday Forum: Andrew Suseno’s Moving Rasa

Friday, April 29th, 2022
12:10PM
Zoom:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/4155846088 

Andrew Suseno is the founder of Moving Rasa (otherwise known as Parcon Resilience). He is a doctor of physical therapy, a modern dancer, and a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method and Laban Movement Analysis.

Rasa is an Indonesian word for taste or feeling discerned by the heart. Its Sanskrit root comes from Indian dramaturges who saw it as a theory for creating art that connected audiences to the divine or essence of things. In Moving Rasa Andrew weaves his extensive training in somatics and improvisation with Indonesian indigenous philosophy and social inquiry to uncover individual and collective pathways to Rasa. Come learn about his journey and try on some of the ideas in this one-hour presentation. 

No experience is necessary. Please come prepared to move and ready to participate in group reflection.

Andrew is a passionate advocate for decolonizing academia and building affinity spaces for BIPOC using movement and awareness building as an essential ingredient to how we show up and create rapport and knowledge with one another. 

https://www.parconhub.com/

Lunch event with Petra Kuppers 

Thursday, April 21st, 2022
12:10PM
Rm 126
Voorhies

Join us for a graduate student discussion with Petra Kuppers. Her wide-ranging research interests include Disability and Trauma Studies, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Drama and Performance, Ecocriticism Theory, Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Creative Writing, and Poetry and Poetics. She is a great resource and likely intersects with your own research, teaching, and activism interests in some way. 

Hope Mohr’s “Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance”

Friday, April 15th, 2022
12:10PM
Zoom:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/4155846088

Shifting Cultural Power locates the work of curating performance in conversations about social change, with a special focus on advancing racial equity in the live arts. Based on the author’s journey as a dancer, choreographer, and activist, as well as on her ten years of leading The Bridge Project, a performing arts presenting platform in the Bay Area, Shifting Cultural Power invites us to imagine new models of relationship among artists and within arts organizations—models that transform our approach, rather than simply re-cast who holds power.

Mohr covers such subjects as transitioning a hierarchical nonprofit to a model of distributed leadership; expanding the canon; having difficult conversations about race; and reckoning with aesthetic bias. “When we reckon with and de-center whiteness, we open imaginative space for decolonized models of artmaking and art community,” Mohr writes. “We create possibilities for shifting cultural power.” Featuring case studies of socially engaged projects in the performing arts; a workbook for embodied research; an archive of The Bridge Project’s ten-year history; and transcripts of landmark performance events.

Contact Improv: Liminal Curves class and Jam. Class led by Aramo Olaya

Wednesday, April 13th, 2022
5:30PM – 7:00PM
Rm 107
Art Annex

LIMINAL CURVES Spirals take place in all instances of matter/energy – from quantum reality to gravitational waves, blood streams, bone structure, flesh fibers, breath, and bodies interacting. In this new series we will focus on the spiraling of body structures and tissues, training the body to enter into the curved world of spherical orientation, through exercises accessible to all bodies regardless of their experience in CI.

Proof of vaccination and masks are required to enter UC Davis facilities. You also have to bring the daily symptoms survey with you. Bring also your body. That will do.

Puppetry as world building with UC Davis Classics Professor and artist Mike Chin​

Friday, April 8th, 2022
12:10PM
Zoom:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/4155846088

Puppetry as worldbuilding with UC Davis Classics Professor and artist Mike Chin

Past Events

Winter 2022 Events

Sarah Ashkin and Diego Martínez-Campos’s “CAJA” / a wrecking of our work in progress “BOX” for the 2022 / Haciendo Contacto / Making Contact / Performance Studies Symposium

Friday, 11 de Marzo 2022
1:10PM – 2:00PM
Lab A 
Wright Hall

Join, en conjunto, a les PFS Dr. Dancers-en-formación Sarah Ashkin, Diego Martínez-Campos, y artistic deshuezadora MFAer Teresa Salas for una [de]construcción en real time de nuestro proyecto en progreso “CAJA” / a wrecking of our work in progress “BOX” for the 2022 / Haciendo Contacto / Making Contact / Performance Studies Symposium.

Más information sobre  “wrecking” here

Proof of vaccination y cubrebocas son required to enter UC Davis facilities. También necesitas tu daily symptoms survey contigo. 

Festival of (In)Appropriation #11 with Festival Director Jaimie Baron

Thursday, March 10th, 2022, 6:00pm-8:00pm
1102 Cruess Hall

Tickets: https://bit.ly/ucdfestival

The Department of Cinema & Digital Media is proud to host the 11th installment of the Festival of (In)Appropriation with an Introduction and Q&A by Festival Director Jaimie Baron, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. In order to adhere to campus protocols for event size, attendees should register for a (free) ticket at the link above.

Jon Rossini’s “Performing Writing Backwards Workshop”

January 21st, 2022, 12pm
Zoom

Performing Writing Backwards examines our habits of writing by thinking about the impact of “working backwards.” PLEASE HAVE A WRITING IMPLEMENT AND SURFACE AREA so that you can do some physical writing during our meeting. And please BRING THE LAST SENTENCE OF A WORK YOU HAVE RECENTLY WRITTEN YOURSELF preferably one structured to persuade or argue for a particular understanding or point of view. The beginning task of physically crafting letters backward is a technical process, but it begins the process of opening up the implicit pressure of the linear argument as a monodirectional form. Moving into the crafting of prose backwards (without necessarily reversing the crafting of letters and words) begins to expose the contingencies and possibilities of our writing craft, highlighting choice at various levels. We will play a bit with sentences and words, and through these smaller units we will hopefully begin to palpably sense the emergent possibilities.

Alex Juhasz’s “Beyond Story Manifesto”

January 11st, 2022, 12pm
Zoom

Workshop with Ben Spatz

November 17th & December 1st, 2021, 12pm
Zoom

• “Artistic Research and the Queer Prophetic”

• “Molecular Identities: Digital archives and decolonial judaism in a laboratory of song.” Performance Research 24.1 (2019): 66-79.

• Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, Agnieszka Mendel, and Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, “Diaspora: An Illuminated Video.” Global Performance Studies 2.1 (2018): 30 minutes.

• Journal of Embodied Research 4.2: Special issue of illuminated videos.

Workshop with Margaret Kemp

October 28th, 2021, 12pm
Arena Theater

(Un)settling lines of care: braiding virtuosity and precarity in the work of the performance artists.

Workshop with Diego Martinez-Campos

October 21st, 2021, 12pm
Arena Theater

Workshop with Aramo Olaya

October 14th, 2021, 12pm
Arena Theater

The concept of “somatic consensus” summarizes the processes I’ve been working on in the last ten years through contact improvisation and tango. It consists of energy-sharing simple exercises that intend to enhance our touch communicating skills. They explore different qualities of consent, consensus, and shared movement, trying to articulate a language of touch based in embodied respect. Possible outcomes are widening our skill to listen to others and our own limits, broadening self-permission, and practicing ways to feel, avoid, divert or restructure violence. “The Queer Touch” is the title I have used for this work when focusing in power relations and freedom, sexuality and gender identity and other social constrains, in search for our body history, our relationships with other bodies, and our purely physical being. The Queer Touch reflects on the childhood socialization experiences of queer people as a source to embody how we got used to the power relations we now live as the “normal.” A second part tries to go beyond this human body history in search of the sensation of our own bodies as animals, and things, looking for a posthuman embodiment which could help us to detach from what we have built as our own stable identity.

Filmmaker Nishtha Jain

May 21, 2019, 12pm
Wright 222

Nishtha Jain is an independent filmmaker based in Mumbai. Currently, she’s a Fulbright Fellow attached to the Department of Radio-TV-Film at The University of Texas at Austin. She’s been a Sundance Documentary Fellow and American Show Case Fellow. She has served as a juror at several important international festivals like the IDFA Amsterdam; Zurich Film Festival; Cinema Verité Teheran among others. She will be presenting her work-in-progress The Golden Thread, which is an immersion into the sense-scape of industrial textile labor. Animated by the philosophy of Anekantavad – Many Sidedness – the film contemplates itself as a product of an encounter between jute workers, early industrial machines, jute fiber, and the film crew.