Lecture and Workshop Series
Fall 2023 Dance Program Lecture and Workshop Series
Monday September 11 at 4:30pm
Troy Dance Lab, LPAC 002
Miro Magloire will speak about his choreographic work for New Chamber Ballet, the company he founded in 2004, focusing on how his recent work challenges ballet conventions related to gender and empowerment. He sees ballet as a living art form with a more exciting future than past and will highlight how New Chamber Ballet quietly but radically practices new forms of experiencing ballet for performers as well as audience members, in the process also experimenting with different approaches to creation, collaboration, and teaching; challenging the notion that excellence must involve exclusion or grow from unhealthy sacrifices.
“For me, ‘tradition’ means to learn, to soak up energy from those who came before us, to understand their wisdom in problem-solving, and then to let go and build something new from it. Trying to preserve successes of the past only reveals their flaws. To really honor the past, you need the courage to let go.” —Miro Magloire
Joellen A. Meglin with Jennifer Conley
Tuesday October 10, 2023 at 4:15 PM
Boyer Dance Studio, LPAC 003
Between Cultures: Ruth Page and Isamu Noguchi’s Collaborations, 1932 and 1944–1946
At two key intersection points in her life, Chicago dancer-choreographer Ruth
Page fortuitously crossed paths with Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Hence came
about, in turbulent times, two collaborations resulting in the production of avant-garde work
infused with intercultural perspective. Expanding Universe (1932) journeyed into the
abstraction of kinetic sculpture brought to life with the chi, and The Bells (1946) laid out a
countercultural postwar worldview. The format of the presentation will include a slide-lecture focused on
the argument and a live showing of my reconstruction of Page’s choreography for Expanding
Universe (2017), performed by dancer Jennifer Conley in a costume created after the original
Noguchi design.
Nicole Cox
Thursday November 2, 2023 at 4:15 PM
Singer 033
Hearts, Minds, and Movement in India’s International Cultural Relations
Hearts and minds, mutual understanding, friendship, universal language – These words and phrases are often used to talk about the power of the performing arts and cultural practices as a tool of diplomacy. But how are these phrases used? And what are the contributions of artists and practitioners whose hearts, minds, and bodies activate programs of cultural and public diplomacy? This talk will examine India’s state discourses about the power of movement based cultural practices, identifying early and contemporary explanations for, and examples of, dance and yoga in India’s interactions with foreign publics.
David Tenorio
Tuesday November 14, 2023 at 4:15 PM
Singer 033
Choreographies of Touch in Urban Mexico
Centering on the sensorial capacities of touch, this talk extends a bridge between dance and affect to understand how queer bodies move through urban infrastructures, such as the Mexico City subway, in the search for playful connection. By interacting with Lia García’s quinceañera performance, and with anonymous videos of underground m4m cruising, I first examine how the heteronormative spaces of urban commuting are interrupted by a force of queer playfulness, bringing pleasure-seeking practices onto the open stages of everyday life. These scenes of queer play reveal an unwritten choreography of touch, that is, a felt sequence guiding the staging of an improvised slow dance, prompting affective connections with bodies—human and otherwise. Focusing on how touch guides the improvisation of queer movement widens our very understanding of how dancing stages come together, in that a disposition for queer play, as evinced in these underground scenes of cruising and dancing, not only rehash subway platforms, connecting corridors, or dark stairways, but also emerge from the sparks of a short-lived queer connection. Ultimately, this talk considers how choreographies of touch enacts possibilities of dancing otherwise across a queer underground.
