2.21 - Amy Smith of Headlong Dance Theatre (Philadelphia)

Amy Smith, Co-Director of Headlong Dance Theater (Philadelphia)
Headlong Dance Theater: Sharing the Work
February 21, 2012
at 12pm
Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater (room 200)

Amy Smith, a founding Co-Director of Headlong, will share some of the results of their artistic research over the past several years. She will talk about the role of the artist in our culture, and share images and video from Headlong’s recent works, especially those working with non-traditional sites
and involving audience/citizen bodies. For example: “CELL”, an experiential journey for one audience member at a time, guided by their cell phone; “Explanatorium”, a performance ritual in an abandoned church involving the entire audience; and “Red Rovers”, half performance, half Mars rover driver conference.

Amy Smith is a Co-Director of Headllong Dance Theater ,Philadelphia-based contemporary dance company. Since 1993, Headlong has created collaborative dance theater works and toured nationally.
Amy met her fellow Co-Directors Andrew Simonet and David Brick, in the Dance Department at
Wesleyan University. After college, she spent a year studying at the Center for New Dance
Development in Holland. Besides Headlong, Amy has performed in the work of Deborah Hay, Ishmael Houston Jones, and other choreographers. She has also performed extensively in theater and cabaret,
and she has won both a Barrymore (for 1812's Suburban Love Songs) and a Bessie (for Headlong's
“ST*R W*RS”). She recently played the role of Jane Fonda in Theater Exile’s production of That Pretty Pretty and choreographed an opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. She has taught and lectured at Rutgers, Drexel, Stephens College, and many other colleges and institutions. She worked for many years doing business management in the for-profit world, and she currently serves as Treasurer on the Dance/USA board of Trustees. In 2008, Headlong started the Headlong Performance Institute a fall semester performance training program for young artists in college (offering full credit) and post-bacs.

2.14 - April Rose Burnam

April Rose Burnam
Constructing Self and Community through Improvisational Tribal Style Bellydance
February 14, 2012
at 12pm
Kaufman studio, 214

Improvisational Tribal Style Bellydance is a form of bellydance practiced around the world today that started in the US in the early 21st century. This dance is evidence that the transnational practice of bellydance continues to promise personal transformation and a sense of community for its practitioners.  In the experience of dancing this structured improvisational form, the dancers put themselves in a situation where the possibility of falling out of unison with one other is confronted repeatedly by the group.  They manage to maintain their group integrity, the choreography, and their relationships to one another, out of which a sense of community is formed and strengthened again and again. I argue that the experience of dancing this form helps to construct a particularly secure and responsive self. Come to witness a live group demonstration, short video presentation of interviews, and snippets of my research.  Please offer your thoughts, connections, and questions for further exploration.

April Rose is working toward her Masters degree in Culture, Performance, and Dance at UCLA?s World Arts and Cultures|Dance Department, where she has also earned a BA in Dance.  Her research explores the many permutations of bellydance practice in the post-1960?s US: in specific, bellydance as a practice that enacts a tension between the potential for personal transformation and social transgression and its tendency to fail in fully reaching that potential.

April took a leave of absence in 2010/2011 to tour internationally with The Bellydance Superstars and was been a performing member of UNMATA for 5 years.  April Rose began Egyptian/American Cabaret (or Raqs Sharqi) bellydance as a child.  She was lucky enough to be immersed in the practice as an adolescent at a time when its underground, punk rock, queer, and 90?s-feminist tendencies had just begun to emerge.  She currently travels abroad on a near monthly basis to teach, speak, and perform at bellydance conferences and teaches three nights a week in LA.  Her life is dedicated simultaneously to bringing into bellydance the theoretical, historical, and compositional knowledge she has gained in WAC and to making people understand the potential bellydance has for thoughtful self expression, community formation, and the challenging of social convention.

www.aprilrosedance.com

2.7 - Carl Schottmiller

If These Stalls Could Talk:  Gendered Spaces and Identity Construction
in Latrinalia
at 12pm
Conference room, 160

Latrinalia (restroom graffiti) scholarship spans disciplines and
generations:  from sexologist Alfred Kinsey to psychoanalytic
folklorist Alan Dundes, scholars have studied latrinalia as revealing
the inner psychological workings of "deviant" subjects.  This project
shifts its analytical focus away from the unknowable graffiti producer
to the consumer.  With a methodology derived from phenomenology,
queer/gender theories, and folkloristics, this presentation
investigates how consumers through engagement with and interpretation
of graffiti produce subjectivities for the unknown producers.  Looking
at documented latrinalia images and interviews with consumers, this
project theorizes latrinalia as spatial tactics through which subjects
may uphold hegemonic notions of gender or deconstruct these notions
through engagement with latrinalia.


Carl Schottmiller is a Culture and Performance Ph.D. student at the
department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance in the University of
California, Los Angeles. He holds a MA degree in Folklore from the
University of California, Berkeley.  This presentation is derived from
his MA thesis of the same title.  Carl?s research interests include
phenomenology, queer corporeal representations, and drag as a
therapeutic tactic for anxiety and body image disorders.