Call for Winter 2014 | DEADLINE: January 15

CHEW ON THIS: Lecture Series 2013-2014

Call for Presentations: DEADLINE: JANUARY 15
*at the very least notify us of your interest in presenting

The Chew On This Lecture Series welcomes presentations for the Winter 2014!!!

Share a choreographic work, a draft of a conference paper, a chapter of your dissertation or any work in progress.
NEW to WAC/D? This is a great way to introduce yourself and your research in a welcoming environment.
Recent grads/Alums in the LA area please considering presenting your work.

Presentations should run about 20 minutes. The rest of the hour is reserved for discussion and feedback.

Chew on This is a noon-time, brownbag lecture and artistic presentation series focusing on works-in-progress. It takes place on Tuesdays in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department (UCLA), throughout the academic year.

This is a graduate student-run event for graduate students, although the series has included faculty and alumni presentations, as well.

To present your work on Chew On This, please send us the following materials:

1. Presentation Title;
2. Presentation description (150 word limit);
3. Bio (200 word limit);
4. Image(s) related to your presentation;
5. A photo of you we can use in the publicity;
6. Any weblinks related to your presentation;
7. Audio visual and space needs;
8. Two preferential dates.
(Please note that the dates are reserved on a first-come-first-serve basis. We'll do our best to accommodate all presenters’ schedules).


The Chew On This committee is currently looking for new members. Please contact us if you are interested in helping out! This is an amazing opportunity to get involved and contribute to the WAC/D community!!


We hope to see you all on Tuesdays, at 12pm!


CONTACT to send materials, get involved, or ask for more information
Ellen Gerdes, Mana Hayakawa, Rita Valente and Carl Schottmiller
chewonthisseries@gmail.com

10/08: Sarah Wilbur

Please join us at the first Chew on This of Fall 2013
Tuesday, Oct 8 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference Room #160

SARAH WILBUR

Dance for Veterans: Political Affect and Alternative Exits

With a now-notorious backlog in mental health service provisions at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and an estimated 22 veterans committing suicide each day, the State’s ongoing investment in movement-based training strategies has taken an interesting turn toward dance-based health interventions. As a joint effort between psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and dance educators at the Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center, the Dance For Veterans Program works to restore a sense of bodily authority among veterans who are living with severe mental illness. In this paper, I situate the Dance for Veterans program alongside a range of military training and killing practices using John Protevi’s (2009) efforts to resuscitate a politics of emotion for poststructuralist philosophy through recourse to cognitive neuroscience. As a materialist philosopher with a skeptical eye toward affective cognition, Protevi’s Deleuguattarian framework considers how biocultural and biopolitical factors contribute to emotional reprogramming at all levels of military service. Protevi’s work offers particular resources for dance and performance scholars seeking to understand the state’s historical investment in affective reprogramming through social practice, for better and for worse.

Sarah Wilbur is a choreographer, performer, dance educator, and academic who currently works for UCLA and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. To reconcile the strange path that led her here (through the more well-traversed routes of non-profit arts production, concert dance, musical theatre, opera, and experimental performance) Sarah’s dissertation research offers an analytical framework through which the choreographic co-operation of artists and institutions might come into sharper relief.  Prior to relocating to Los Angeles in 2007, Sarah worked for a decade in the non-profit arts sector as an artist-advocate-administrator. Conference presentations include: Congress On Research in Dance, American Society for Theater Research, UCLA GESIS Teacher Education Program/UCLA, and Dance Under Construction. Sarah’s writing on dance and the limits of U.S. arts policy appears the current Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship. She also sweats more than most humans.

6/5: Emily Beattie

Please join us during WEEK 10

CHEW ON THIS

WEDNESDAY, 6/5, 12-1p

Kaufman Conference room 160

Talk followed by light refreshments and snacks

Presenter: Emily Beattie

shadowline: Playing with the edges in performance and technology 

In rehearsal periods in the Fall and Winter, I was given the opportunity to set work on students in a pre-professional dance company at Brown University. The piece I set was called shadowline, which is a performance work that featured projected animations, dance, and an original score. I chose to include projections as a way to visually address the storyline of the piece, which features a piece of technology that creates a fatal connection for the main character. The actual integration of this component posed many questions for me and my process. Performer interaction with the projections provided some challenges and some benefits for the performers as well as the experience of the viewer. By looking at earlier versions of the work, explaining how the animation is now activated, and showing the final work, I hope to discuss some of the implications for dancemaking with technology that I found.

Emily Beattie is originally from Fredericksburg, Virginia and currently works as a performer and choreographer in both Boston and Los Angeles. As a performer, Emily has been honored to participate in the works of Stephen Koplowitz, Edisa Weeks, Donald Byrd, Sara Rudner, Jennifer Monson, Simone Forti, Lionel Popkin and several national companies. Since 2003, her interest in collaborative performance and technology interventions has been supported and performed both nationally and internationally by organizations such as Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, Pieter Performance Space, Brown University, Boston CyberArts Festival, Green Street Studios, Somerville Arts Council, Glouchester New Arts Festival, Oberon Theater, World Arts Music/Crash Arts, Support Women Artists Now Day Inc., Kyoto Cultural Festival 2011 Renku Poetry Conference and Festival, and Rhodopi International Theater Lab.  Emily extensively collaborates with composer and designer Eric Gunther who founded the design and performance studio sosolimited. emilybeattie.com

5/28: Dr. David Shorter | 5/30: Yehuda Sharim

Please join us for TWO Chew on This sessions, this week!

Tuesday, 5/28, 12-1pm
*Kaufman Room 208*
Presenter: Professor David Shorter
Going Glocal: Collaborating with Indigenous Language Learners on Globalizing Technologies

Thursday, 5/30, 12-1pm
*Kaufman Room Conference*
Presenter: Yehuda Sharim
Yehuda will present on his dissertation.

5/21: Sharna Fabiano | 5/24: Laurel Tentindo & Kevin Williamson

Please join us for TWO Chew on This sessions next week!

Tuesday, 5/21 at 12pm,
Kaufman Conference Room

SHARNA FABIANO
Prawns a la Indigo: Tango as Physical Theater

AND

Friday, 5/24 at 12pm
Kaufman Room 200

LAUREL TENTINDO and KEVIN WILLIAMSON
Neanderthal vs Cyborg

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Tuesday, 5/21 at 12pm, Kaufman Conference Room
SHARNA FABIANO

Prawns a la Indigo: Tango as Physical Theater

In February and March, I had the honor of collaborating with the Czech company Spitfire on a new project: Prawns a la Indigo. Spitfire refers to its own work as “authorial theater” and often seeks to combine genres and styles of live performance. In this session, I’ll give a guided tour of some rehearsal footage and speak about how we assembled physical material generated 1. through tango movement principles, 2. in response to surrealist images, and 3. following an original script, which describes four women who meet in a café to start a revolution.
Sharna Fabiano is an internationally recognized tango artist. She was a member of the NYC-based all-woman company TangoMujer from 2003-2006, and ran her own performing group in Washington, DC from 2006-2010, investigating the fusion of tango with contemporary dance and theater. While living in DC, she also founded the nonprofit organization Tango Mercurio, which created outreach programs for urban youth and elders and an all-volunteer tango orchestra for social dancing. In 2008, Sharna was named to Dance magazine's "25 To Watch" list and featured as an emerging artist in the Washingtonian. In addition to her performance work, she also co-founded the Global Milonga, an international benefit for reforestation that links simultaneous tango events through online streaming audio and video, and the Women’s Tango Retreat, a national gathering for women who dance both roles.

***

Friday, 5/24 at 12pm, Kaufman Room 200
LAUREL TENTINDO and KEVIN WILLIAMSON

Neanderthal vs Cyborg

Neanderthal vs Cyborg is a sci-fi dance experiment.  Parallel histories morph in and outside of the studio to reveal the absurd and vulnerable.  It is an imagined dance where two people make a show about making a show. Through the vastness of the incomprehensible universe, these two characters are magnetically pulled together.  The responsibility to make an intelligible piece weighs on them.  These fallen heroes exploit one another and themselves while engaging in theatrical impulses,   genre-bending, and improvised dance.  They search for authenticity.  This performance transforms into a party - if everything goes right.   Laurel and Kevin are using Chew on This as an informal opportunity to share this process with the UCLA community and to experiment with technical elements (Thanks to Arsenio!).  The final performance of Neanderthal vs Cyborg will take place at the Electric Lodge in Venice on June 7th at 9 pm the event is FREE.

Laurel Tentindo (laureltentindo.com) and Kevin Williamson(http://kdubdance.org/) are dancers, choreographers and educators, both currently in their first year of the MFA program.

5/14: Doran George

Please join us at our next Chew on This
Tuesday, May 14 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference room

DORAN GEORGE

Tearing down The Final Curtain: Performing Communities of Radical Pleasure.

My editorial for the last of Britain’s Dance Theatre Journal focuses upon the influence of sex radical culture on performance and dance in San Francisco. I argue that prudish art praxis became so entrenched throughout the 20th century that working with sex takes labor, and erotic performance and dance struggle to achieve the status of art. Yet independent alternative sexual practice is crucial for performance now that state and commercial interests have appropriated feminist and queer representational strategies. Critical attention to the Bay Area sex/art community is important because as alternative sexual practice has appeared to enter the mainstream, patriarchal heterosexual ideals have replaced rank and file critical cultures. In broad strokes I compare key influences in San Francisco with emphases in London dance performance that impose a chaste culture. Yet I suggest that if sexual experimentation is seen as a queering of the pioneer narrative, complex racial and national discourses that cut across California are erased.

Doran George is a scholar and artist completing a doctorate on ‘Somatics’ in contemporary dance. His scholarship is published in dance, film, and art journals including chapters in forthcoming Oxford University press volumes, and his artist’s images and writing is found in art publications. Doran has chaired academic conferences, presented symposia, as well as programmed performance, all with a focus on identity deconstruction. He has been funded as an artist by: L.A. Cultural Affairs, London Arts Board, Arts Council of England, British Council, Finnish Arts Council and others. Doran has danced for various choreographers, works as a professional mentor, and leads participatory projects such as working with people diagnosed with terminal illness and those experiencing bereavement. He teaches in art colleges, universities and professional arts contexts in Europe and the US. Doran trained at the European Dance Development Center (NL) and completed a Feminist Performance MA at Bristol University (U.K.)

NEXT Chew on This

Tuesday, 5/21: Sharna Fabiano
Conference room

Friday, 5/24: Laurel Tentindo and Kevin Williamson
Room 200

5/7: "From X to Why: A Museum Takes Shape"

 Please join us at our next Chew on This

From X to Why: A Museum Takes Shape
Tuesday, 5/7 from 12-1pm
Kaufman Room 208
Presenters: Professor Mary (Polly) Nooter Robert
Graduate Students: Peter Haffner, Elyan Hill, Dana Marterella, Elaine Sullivan, Rita Valente, and Tommy Tran

From X to Why: A Museum Takes Shape is the graduate student-curated section of the Fowler Museum’s 50th anniversary exhibition, opening in Fall 2013. This mini-exhibition focuses on the Fowler Museum’s earliest acquisitions. These objects demonstrate the strength and breadth of the collection and foreshadow the Fowler’s role as one of the premiere museums for preserving and displaying works of art from cultures around the world. In this presentation, the graduate students (Dana Marterella, Elaine Sullivan, Elyan Hill, Peter Haffner, Rita Valente, and Tommy Tran) and the project’s mentor (Professor Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts) will talk about the conceptualization and research process underlying the exhibition. They will also explain the core concept of the project, and how it materializes in the title. Finally, the group will guide us through the exhibition and introduce us to some of the objects that will be displayed.

Dana Marterella, Elaine Sullivan, Elyan Hill, Peter Haffner, and Rita Valente are doctoral students in the Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Tommy Tran is a doctoral student at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Martarella is developing a comparative study of Victoria Ocampo and Eva Perón, in which she examines how celebrity, commodity, class, and gender intersect as two women curate a global image for self and nation. Sullivan’s research interests include museum studies and the visual arts of the Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hill examines the significance of dance practices in honor of the West African water deity Mami Wata in understanding African perspectives on the black Atlantic. Haffner’s research focuses on the connections between tourism and the production of art in Haiti. Valente studies how theater festivals in Portuguese-speaking countries use the concept of Lusophony to negotiate the colonial past shared by those nations. Tran studies the contemporary use of folklore and heritage in Jeju Island, South Korea.

Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts is Professor in UCLA's Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance and Consulting Curator for African Art at the LACMA. She holds an MA and PhD in Art History from Columbia University, and served as Senior Curator at the Museum for African Art until 1994 and as Deputy Director and Chief Curator of UCLA’s Fowler Museum until 2008. Roberts is the author and curator of thematic books and exhibitions that explore the philosophical underpinnings of African visual arts and expressive culture, such as secrecy, memory, writing and inscription, as well as topics of the body and female representation, arts of divination and healing, and theories of exhibiting. Together with Allen F. Roberts, she produced the award-winning works Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996) and A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003). In 2007, she was decorated by the Republic of France as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for her promotion of francophone African artists.


NEXT CHEW on THIS: May 14 with Doran George

4/30: Peter Haffner

Please join us at our next Chew on This
Tuesday, 4/30 at 12pm
Kaufman conference room 160

Aesthetic Beneficence: Tourism and Art Production in Haiti

Art objects from are sold to tourists and collectors throughout the Caribbean and the Americas as souvenirs and decorative objects that signify notions of exoticism, tropicality, and primitivism. How have writers, art dealers, curators, and collectors helped to shape and advance such problematic narratives? How did “Haitian art” come to be classified as such and by whom? What discourses are advanced as a result of such classifications? How can theories of tourism help us analyze the history of contemporary art in Haiti and understand the responses by artists in Haiti and abroad?

Peter Haffner is a second year PhD student in the Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the connections between tourism and the production of art in Haiti through an interdisciplinary approach that includes visual studies, museum studies, cultural studies, tourism studies, and art history. After receiving his BA in Art History from Bard College, he worked in several New York City art galleries in a variety of positions. In addition to his academic work, Peter is a co-leader of the upcoming student-curated section of the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s 50th anniversary exhibitions.

2/19: Doran George

Please join us at our next CHEW ON THIS:
Tuesday, 12/19/13 at 12pm
Kaufman conference room, 160

PRESENTER: DORAN GEORGE

Moving constructions of nature: dancing the Somatically trained body from collective resistance to compliant individuality.

Dramatic historical change defines a lineage of “Somatic” contemporary dance practice based on the idea of universal human physiology and subjectivity. Biological and mechanical constructs form the logic for dance classes, which are said to uncover “natural” movement that emphasizes authenticity, individuality, and harmonious cooperation. By the 1970s, alliances and interconnected pedagogies had formed a transnational web of associations between artists and institutions teaching Somatics in several post/industrialized “Western” locales. Principles in the rhetoric of Somatics sustained three distinct phases of development: over forty years dancers embodied transformation in the conception of democratic participation, self-representation, and capitalist productivity. 1970s collective participation was established to achieve “direct democracy,” as practitioners critiqued established modern dance, fueled by mistrust of “representative democracy” and hierarchy. The 1980s and 1990s saw the recalibration of Somatics to staunch individuality in identity-based protest choreography, even while “signature choreography” was marked in a new arts business-growth culture. By the close of the 20th century the widespread institutionalization of Somatics embodied late capitalist appropriation of previously critical practices: Personal responsibility and individual freedom for dancers has purportedly displaced authoritarianism, yet ‘natural’ self-determination and flexibility are requirements serving the smooth and efficient running of an unequal economy.


Doran George is a dance artist completing a doctorate at U.C.L.A. on ‘Somatic’ training in contemporary dance. He has received arts funding from L.A. Cultural Affairs, London Arts Board, Arts Council of England, British Council, Finnish Arts Council, venue commissions and regional funding. Doran has danced for various choreographers, and works as a mentor, most recently through the California Choreographers In Mentorship Exchange program, and The Wellcome Trust in London. He also uses performance to investigate social problems like bereavement and diagnosis with terminal illness. Doran has chaired academic conferences and presented numerous symposia in the arts. He is in print and on the web in dance, film, and performance art journals and art publications, and has chapters in forthcoming Oxford University Press publications. He teaches in universities, art colleges, and professional dance settings. Doran trained at the European Dance Development Center (NL) and completed an M.A. in Feminist Performance at Bristol University (U.K.)

11/27: Yvette Martínez-Vu

Please join us for our next Chew on This

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

Please join us for our next Chew on This

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

Please join us for our next Chew on This

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

Please join us for our next Chew on This

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

Join us for our next Chew On This
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

Please join us at our next Chew on This.

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

Please join us for our next Chew on This

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?