11/27: Yvette Martínez-Vu

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Yvette Martínez-Vu
Tuesday, November 27 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference Room 160

Surrogated Objects and Cultural Performances in Rosi’s Botánica

Among Latino communities in southern California, multiple botánicas offer immigrant populations ways to create and sustain support systems through object-centered syncretic practices. My investigation will focus on the ways that glass candles sold in my mother’s botánica are continually surrogated to set in motion a series of performances that produce spaces of cultural and economic capital as well as communities of female solidarity and survival.

Yvette Martínez-Vu is a PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA, where she also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English. Her research investigates the role that ceremonial objects in contemporary Mexican and Chicana performance play in manifesting nonwestern forms of knowledge production and transmission. As an undergraduate, Martínez-Vu was awarded the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship and for two years now she has served as a Mellon Mays mentor and program coordinator through UCLA’s Undergraduate Research Center. At the moment, Martínez-Vu is thrilled to be co-organizing Hemi GSI Convergence 2013, an interdisciplinary conference among activists, artists, and scholars across the Americas, which will be hosted at USC and UCLA.

11/13: Chew on This: Laurel Tentindo

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Laurel Tentindo
Tuesday, November 13 at 12pm
Kaufman Room 280
Freedom through Systems of Choreography: Trisha Brown's Early Works

Judson Church transformed the aesthetics of contemporary dance by redefining the value system and movement vocabulary dancers employed from then on.  In Chew On This I will focus on Trisha Brown's (a member of the Judson Church) Early Works - performed on rooftops, parks, and on the sides of buildings.  Trisha described herself as a brick layer with a sense of humor.  These pieces are methodical and often involve a rule game.  I will show how these pieces allowed Brown to develop a basic language that she then took to the proscenium stage to create pieces like Glacial Decoy, Set and Reset, and her current work.  I am asking questions about form/freedom, the preference for abstraction, the source of movement vocabulary and about what our generation's relationship is to the discoveries of the Judson Church.  

Laurel Jenkins Tentindo’s dances are energetic drawings on which costumes, objects, and puppets ride to evoke aesthetically rich and emotionally resonant worlds.  Laurel’s choreographic and dancing practices are deeply influenced by the Skinner Releasing Technique, Improvisation, and Trisha Brown’s movement vocabulary.  As an acclaimed member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 2007-2012, she performed repertory spanning Ms. Brown’s 40-year career, and developed original roles in Brown’s three most recent pieces.  Laurel also worked closely with choreographers Vicky Shick, Sara Rudner, and Liz Lerman.  She appeared in Harry Partch’s opera, Delusion of the Fury, directed by John Jesurun at the Japan Society, NYC, and The Mad Dancers, Washington DC.  Laurel developed choreography for Poe (and the museum of lost arts), directed by Elise Kermani.   Laurel’s independent choreography has been performed internationally and in NYC at Danspace St. Marks Church, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Dixon Place and Joyce SoHo.  Working with puppet theater director Luis Tentindo since 2007, Laurel has collaboratively created two evening length experimental puppet theater pieces exploring the interaction between bunraku puppetry and dance.  Would You Still Be You? and The Mud Angels received support from the Jim Henson Foundation. This spring 2012 Laurel was a guest faculty member at the New School and created an original dance with the students inspired by the underlying principals of Trisha Brown’s choreography.  Laurel is a certified Skinner Releasing teacher. 

More information
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCQhi_7xa9s&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocIg5y_4ZRY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ru_7sxvpY8&feature=related

11/06: Chew on This: Emily Beattie

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Emily Beattie
Tuesday, November 6 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference Room (160)

A Feminine Reflex: Emily Beattie's performance work in 'Gone with the Wind: Remixed"

A Feminine Reflex is the name of a work-in-progress dance and technology performance that Emily Beattie created for a performance in UCLA's Theater, Film and Television Department in the Spring 2012. After an overview of the course that led to this performance, and a brief discussion about the process for the dance work, Emily will share documentation of"A Feminine Reflex". She would like to open a discussion surrounding the choreographic strategies employed for media integration in this performance.

Emily Beattie (Fredericksburg, VA) makes performance work for site, stage, and film. She collaborates with composers, filmmakers, multimedia artists, poets, and performers to create work that critically addresses the effect of technology on live arts and global communities. Her performance work has been featured nationally in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and internationally in Ecuador and Japan. Emily received her training at the Boston Conservatory where she earned her BFA in contemporary dance. Currently, Emily is pursuing her MFA in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department. Her thesis dance work shadow is commissioned to perform in Brown University’s Spring Festival of Dance in 2013. As a performer, Emily is in development on projects with David Rousseve/Reality, and Lionel Popkin with premiers starting in 2013.

10/23: Chew on This: Peter Sellars

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Peter Sellars
Tuesday, October 23 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference room, 160 (location might change)
'Hello, WHAT?!?'

Peter Sellars, professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance shares first-hand updates about his work.

Peter Sellars, a director of opera, theatre and film, is renowned worldwide for his innovative treatments of classical material from western and non-western traditions, and for his commitment to exploring the role of the performing arts in contemporary society. He has served as artistic director of the Los Angeles Festival, the American National Theatre at the Kennedy Center, the Boston Shakespeare Company and the Elitch Theatre for Children in Denver. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and was awarded the Erasmus Prize at the Dutch Royal Palace for contributions to European culture. Recent projects include directing John Adams' El Ni’o; Handel's Theodora; Stravinksy's The Story of a Soldier; a 25-year survey exhibition of the work of American artist Bill Viola; Jean Genet's The Screens, adapted by poet Gloria Alvarez, with the Cornerstone Theater Company and performers from the community of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles; and Peony Pavilion composed by Tan Dun and featuring renowned Kun Opera performer Hua Wenyi.

10.05 - Carl Schottmiller

Please join us for the first Chew on This of the Fall Quarter 2012!!

Carl Schottmiller
Tuesday, October 9 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference room 160

 ‘The Shade of it All’:
RuPaul, ‘Camp Capitalism,’ and the race to redefine drag


With her reality show RuPaul's Drag Race, RuPaul creates a new field of cultural production tha redefines drag in her image. By decontextualizing and repurposing material from Paris is Burning, RuPau uproots drag from its community based activist-oriented origins and repackages the art form as self-centered, materialistic endeavor in whihc only gay man participate. As her reality show grows in popularity and disseminates this distorted understanding of a vast art form, Drag Race erases alternate, more subversive modes of gender identification and performance.

Carl Schottmiller is a Ph.D student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.  With a BA in Women’s Studies & English and a MA in Folklore, he utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the connections among gender performance, folklore, and social activism.

His current project analyzes how drag performers generate community-based, activist-oriented kinship systems as alternatives to an ineffective, heteronormative nuclear family model.

5.29 - Feriyal Aslam

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Tuesday May 29 at 12pm
Kaufman Hall Conference Room 160

Feriyal Aslam presents

Choreographing Inclusivity in Pakistan:

The Tree, the Dancer, and the City

In this presentation Feriyal introduces a section of her PhD dissertation project, centered on life
and choreographies of Indu Mitha which provide the foci to probe broader questions of the place
of the outliers, i.e. Muslims in India, and non-Muslims and “non-Pakistanis” in Pakistan (Post
1971), in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India. Indu’s choreography Islamabad qa muqaddas
daraxht (The Sacred Tree of Islamabad) facilitates the author on a journey to occluded parts of her
hometown Islamabad, to its rich Buddhist and pluralistic histories in sharp contrast with the twenty-
first-century tragic fate of Islamabad’s historical Bodhi tree. The dancing bodies of Indu’s male
students also from a marginalized Christian community provide another contrast to founding father
Jinnah’s vision for an inclusive Pakistan. The dancer and her tactics, the tree, the city of Islamabad
and its occluded histories serve as call to promote inclusivity in Pakistan, bring forth voices of
the underrepresented in Pakistani society today namely: non-Muslim communities in Pakistan,
underrepresented Muslims, and occluded Islamic values such as muhabbat, amen, ravadarie (love, peace, and good behavior).

Bio: Feriyal Amal Aslam is a Ph.D candidate at Department of World Arts and Cultures at the
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), commencing her dissertation this quarter. A
Fulbright (2004-2009) and East-West Center (2005-2006) alumni, currently a Teaching Fellow for
a unique Urdu-Hindi program at the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at UCLA. Trained
as social and cultural anthropologist with an MA from the University of Hawaii (UH) and an MSc
from Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan, her first dissertation traced the genealogical and cultural
history of the Rubabis, a clan of Muslim performers in Sikh Gurdwaras for generations, who reside in
present day Lahore. Her present project in occluded, contested histories is taking her towards soft-
ball diplomacy approach using aesthetic and performative practices, people to people diplomacy
towards better solutions to peaceful relations between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

5.22 - Alison D'Amato

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ALISON D'AMATO

Bodies Under the Influence: Anne Bass, Sy Sar, and the Politics of PatronageDescription:

Tuesday, May 22

12pm

Kaufman Conference room 160

This paper interrogates the role of individual patronage in choreographic production, focusing on the extent to which such support exerts a profound influence on the dancing body. It is grounded in a close analysis of the relationship between patron Anne Bass and dancer Sokvannara “Sy” Sar as represented in Bass's 2010 documentary, “Dancing Across Borders.” By deconstructing the documentary's themes of discovery, rescue, and elite cultural authority, this analysis lends a particular urgency to questions that dance studies scholars can and should pose more widely – namely, what dances are being made, for whom, and with what resources.
Alison D'Amato is pursuing a PhD in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where her work focuses on scoring and notational practices. She holds an MA in European Dance Theater Practice from Laban and a BA in Philosophy from Haverford College. As a choreographer and performer, Alison's work has been presented in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, England, and Poland. Her writing on performance can be found in Choreographic Practices, itch, and Native Strategies.

5.15 - Ana Paula Hofling

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Ana Paula Höfling

Tuesday, May 15 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference room, 160 

Choreographing Afro-Brazilian modernity through capoeira

In the mid 1930s, capoeira was codified and divided into two opposing styles.  The style known as capoeira regional embodied order, progress and modernity during a time when Brazil was reinventing itself as a modern nation.  Capoeira angola, initially called capoeira de Angola (from Angola), was conceptualized as the “original” capoeira, where African traditions “survived” in spite of progress. Capoeira regional has been interpreted as a loss of “character,” i.e., loss of capoeira’s African “roots.”  I argue that this perceived loss actually fueled the invention of traditions that gave rise to capoeira de Angola—a capoeira from Angola that was just as Brazilian and as modern as capoeira regional.  My analysis focuses on how capoeira’s modernity and tradition were invented at the movement level—what movements were reimagined, recycled, or discarded.

5.8.12 - Alessandra Williams!

5/8/12: CHEW ON THIS
TUESDAY AT 12PM
KAUFMAN STUDIO 208

Alessandra Williams!
AN EXPLORATION OF LAND, NARRATIVE AND PERFORMANCE!

This presentation is the performance produc@on for Alessandra Williams’s Master’s thesis work. In this 25‐minute solo piece, Williams uses theatre, song, spoken word, and dance to explore how narrative helps to exemplify an important context of land politics in the twentieth century. Additionally, she uses written text to accomplish two things: first, to position a former black woman sharecropper’s
memory of land dispossession within economic theory and debate; second, to examine how this specific narrative reveals the role property ownership played in historical events of lynching or vigilante violence. Williams concludes by positing that the performance of this narrative might radically transform our understandings of the links between racism and capitalism in the US.

Alessandra Williams is in her second‐year as a Culture and Performance PhD student at UCLA. Through an interdisciplinary approach, her research explores land, narrative, gender and performance. She received her Bachelor’s in American Studies and Dance at Macalester College. Originally from Minneapolis, her community organizing work earned her the Grassroots Solutions Organizer of the Year Award and she remains committed to bridging the worlds of academe, art, and community.

3.13 - Dana Marterella

Dana Marterella
March 13, 2012
at 12pm
Kaufman Conference room, 160

Descamisados:  Representations of the Body in the Evita Museum

Through an analysis of the Evita Museum in Buenos Aires, this presentation will explore the ways in which the body is represented and theorized as a site of national memory.

Dana Marterella is an associate professor of English and Humanities at Glendale College.  She is a PhD student in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance, where she researches themes of nationalism in literature, visual art and iconography in Latin America.

2.28 - CedarBough Saeji

February 28, 2012
in 12pm
Kaufman room, 160

CedarBough Saeji

A Case Study of Mask Dance Drama Students:
Capitalizing on Korean Heritage?

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.

1.31 - I-Wen Chang

Throwing Out Leader-Follower Rules: Gender-shifting in Taiwanese Salsa Today
12pm
Conference room, 160

Salsa is a transnational and transcultural dance form that has
traveled from the Americas to many other countries. In the past five
years, it has become a craze among young professionals in Taiwan.
Inevitably, salsa is represented differently in various cultural
contexts. In this paper, I argue that the notion of "flow" in salsa
practice, the Confucian discipline of the female body, and the
economic accessibility of salsa in Taiwan are contextual elements
without which it is impossible to situate the social meaning of salsa
dancing in Taiwan in its proper light. In the Taiwanese salsa scene,
not only do female salsa practitioners gain agency and assert their
power to challenge traditional values, but male salsa practitioners
also find a space to perform and enjoy their femininity without being
judged. There are two imperatives for this study: 1) to subvert the
dominant notion in academia about the immobile gender rules at play in
salsa; 2) to illustrate the diversity salsa practice using Taiwan as a
case study where it has not yet been discussed in the growing
scholarship on Asian performance.

I-Wen Chang is a Culture and Performance Ph.D. student at the
department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance in the University of
California, Los Angeles. She holds a MA degree in Art Theory and
Criticism from the Taipei National University of the Arts. Her master
thesis is titled "Beyond Representation: Interpreting Pina Bausch's
Dance Theater and Its Significance to the Contemporary Arts." I-Wen is
a trained Chinese folkdancer and salsa dancer. Her research interests
include phenomenology in social dance, corporeal representations,
gender issues, cultural hegemony, and post-colonialism. Specifically,
she focuses on how pair-dancing becomes a means of communication and
enables social mobility, how corporeal practices construct national
identity, how the Taiwanese encounter the West through corporeal
practices under globalization, and how salsa is represented
differently in various cultural contexts. I-Wen is the special
correspondent for the Artistic Magazine (Taiwan), the art critic for
the ARTCO (Taiwan), and the co-editor of a Taipei based experimental
dance semi-annual periodical titled BINDO PAPER."

1.24 - Meena Murugesan

Please join us at our next
Chew on This

Meena Murugesan
split/focus (13-min)
January 24, 2012
Kaufman studio 214


split/focus is a solo contemporary Indian dance work that strives to connect multiple meanings and points of focus. Can seemingly disparate objects/subject /concepts come into focus simultaneously? (background/foreground) Where is one's point of focus? (mudhra/nritta) Where can fragments of emotion, technique and meaning intersect? (abstract/narrative)

Feedback session facilitated by Shyamala Moorty of Post-Natyam.

Choreographic Consultant/Mentor: Professor Janet O'Shea (LA)
Sound Composer: Kaveh Nabatian (Mtl)
Lighting Designer: Lee Anholt (Mtl)
Movement Consultant: Shyamala Moorty (LA)
Rehearsal Director: Nova Bhattacharya(Toronto)

Meena's multi-disciplinary performance practice is fuelled by her
commitment to dance, visual imagery, personal transformation and social
change. Her hybrid choreographic vision stems from twenty-four years of
training in bharatanatyam, four years of study in afro-contemporary dance
and street dance forms, a decade of creating visual imagery and five years
of training in eastern energetic bodywork.

Meena's recent choreographies include *pou/voir* (25-minutes, 2011), *
reBuild* (15-minutes, 2009), *whirling wailing woman* (10-minutes, 2009), *
AVAL* (26-minutes, 2008), *Unravelled* (50-minutes, 2006), in addition to a
dozen other collective creations and numerous improvised live performances.
Since 2004, she has performed her work in Montreal, Toronto, New York,
Niger, Chile and Brazil.

Parallel to Meena's dance career, she is also a community arts educator with ten years of local and international experience collaborating with under-represented groups such as youth, people of colour and incarcerated women using video and movement.

Currently, Meena is an MFA Dance candidate at the University of California
in Los Angeles in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department. She is also
working on a commission for the CanAsian Dance Festival (Toronto) to
premiere in February 2012.


Janet O'Shea: Mentor/Choreographic Consultant
Janet O'Shea is the author of *At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on
the Global Stage*(Wesleyan University Press 2007) the co-editor the *Routledge
Dance Studies Reader* (second edition) (2010), and a co-editor of the *Routledge
Online Encyclopedia of Modernism*. She has studied and performed bharata
natyam since 1988, while simultaneously pursuing it as a subject of
scholarly inquiry and is currently investigating ways of integrating her
study of this classical form with her ongoing interest in modern and
postmodern dance. She is Associate Professor in the department of World
Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kaveh Nabatian: Sound Composer
Kaveh is an award-winning filmmaker and musician based in Montreal. With degrees
in both Film Production and Jazz Studies from Concordia University, he
has directed both fiction and documentary films, music videos, and
television series. His films have played at over thirty international
festivals, from which he has won numerous awards. Much of his time as a
musician is dedicated to Bell Orchestre, an avant-chamber ensemble in which
he plays trumpet, keyboards, and an array of analog and electronic
instruments. Bell Orchestre has released two critically-acclaimed albums,
won a Juno award, toured Europe and North America extensively, collaborated
with the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra and LaLaLa Human Steps, and done a
composition residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Kaveh also plays
with Little Scream and composes music for films (including his own),
orchestra, dance, and theatre.

Lee Anholt: Lighting Designer
Lee Anholt graduated from Simon Fraser University in 1990 with a BA in
Contemporary Dance. He has been lighting for dance since 1995 and has been
touring extensively since 2000. He has worked with Peggy Baker, Montréal
Danse, José Navas, Margie Gillis and Marie Chouinard among others. Lee has
also designed lights for various independant choreographers, including
Chanti Wadge, Chantal Lamirande, and others. He is currently working with
Louise Lecavalier. Lee likes beer and frisbee.