Jonathan González

In this course, graduates and upper-class undergraduates with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based art works that include live performance will design and direct individual projects. Students and faculty will meet weekly to view works-in-progress and discuss relevant artistic and practical problems, both in class and in conferences. Attributes of the work across multiple disciplines of artistic endeavor will be discussed as integral and interdependent elements in the work. Participation in mentored, critical-response feedback sessions with peers will be a key aspect of the course. The engagement with the medium of time in live performance, the constraints of presentation of the works, both in works-in-progress and in a shared program of events, and the need to respect the classroom and presentation space of the dance studio will be the constraints imposed on the students’ artistic proposals. Students working within any number of live performance traditions are as welcome in this course as those seeking to transgress orthodox conventions. While all the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not neatly fall into a traditional notion of what constitutes dance. The cultivation of open discourse across traditional disciplinary artistic boundaries, both in the process of developing the works and in the context of presentation to the public, is a central goal of the course. The faculty leading this course have roots in dance practice but have also practiced expansive definitions of dance within their own creative work. This course will culminate in performances of the works toward the end of the semester in a shared program with all enrolled students. Performances of the works will take place on campus.

If ambivalence refers to “having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone,” what might dancing ambivalently imply? Why might the desire to dance ambivalently present itself? What are the social and aesthetic concerns of an ambivalent Dance historical lineage?

In Arabella Stanger’s, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession, Stanger analyzes how state and federal agencies collaborated with Euro-American Modernist pioneers of Dance and Architecture. Reviewing seminal dance works like that of Martha Graham’s, Frontier (1935), and Graham’s collaboration with the United States Indian Removal Act (IRA), Stanger illustrates how contemporary techniques of Euro-American dance and choreography, such as “taking up space”, are referential to choreographies of urban renewal and settler colonialism. Following this underside of reading Euro-American dance history, Saidiya Hartman’s, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, identifies how mandated dances served as a measure of management and surveillance upon the enslaved in the plantation economy and Great Migration passage aboard ships of the Trans-Atlantic. Within Hartman’s speculative and archival text, a counter-archive of Dance is presented to readers – an archive resistant to colonial impositions (Jasmine Johnson, Black Laws of Dance) – wherein the testimony of an enslaved woman, Mary Glover, appears through an act of refusal to dance: “[…] the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the slave owner’s effort to cultivate contented subjection. However, the complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatically, “I don't want [that kind of pleasure].” (Hartman, 11)

How might an orientation of ambivalence lead us to towards a multidirectional understanding of dance and choreography?

How might thinking with dance, beyond the dominant discourse of consent and pleasure, reveal Dance’s entanglement with aesthetic, sociopolitical, and necro-political practices for disciplining the body?

Reaching for an underside comprehension and counter-archive of Dance, inspired by the orientation of ambivalence, students will engage scholarship across forms of film, essay, poetry, image, sound, performance and choreographic exercises. A dialogical setting will allow us to familiarize ourselves to the coursework, and pose queries of its relation to our own ongoing scholarship. The conclusion of the semester will require an original work in response to the course material.