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

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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.