11.29 - Olive McKeon

Olive McKeon
Dance and its Negation: On Konzept Tanz and its Discontents

November 29
12pm, Kaufman Room 160

In this lecture-performance, I discuss the major figures within the emergence of conceptual dance from the mid-90s to present, the distinguishing characteristics of this genre, its relation to conceptualism in the visual arts, the distinction between dancey-dance and conceptual dance, the split it generates between dance and choreography, and more ambitiously, the negation of dance, the destructive seed or utopian kernel that will be the undoing of the form. Particular attention will be paid to understanding male privilege within dance and shifts in artistic labor within capitalism. As with all proper lecture-performances, this will be part-autobiography, part-farce, part-dry-dead-panned-theory.

Olive Mckeon is a communist, but perhaps the kind of communist you have not met yet. She is also a peach, a loose wolf, a lost bird, and a woman. Her favorite choreographer is Matija Ferlin.

11.15 - Doran George

November 15
12pm Kaufman room 160

Dancing Queer Nature: Exploring Jennifer Monson's choreographic practice of the early 90s as critical re-engagement with radical feminist aesthetics.

This is a presentation of ideas that I am working on for a conference paper and journal article. I propose that radical feminist aesthetic practices have fallen into critical oblivion since the emergence of queer theory. Yet they were foundational in the formation of extant queer critique of heteronormative genders. The artistic contribution of choreographer Jennifer Monson highlights how cultural feminism produced a female body that challenged the natural basis of heterosexual gender. In line with second wave feminism, she mobilized the widely held belief in the natural status of the body and gender, yet did so in way that configured as fictional the conceit that gender is bifurcated, real, and static. Monson's oeuvre demonstrates a lineage of feminist staging of female corporeality that deploys the body as a queer effect of nature.

Doran George is a practicing artist, dancer and curator reading for a PhD in Dance at UCLA in California researching the impact of 'somatic practice' on the late 20th Century modern-dance avant-garde. His performance work includes actions such as being encased in bricks and mortar and has been presented in Live Art, Dance, Theatre, Visual Art, and politically-themed 'identity' based contexts in Europe and the US. Doran has been publically funded and commissioned in the UK, Finland,
the Netherlands, and the US. He sustains an issue-based participatory/dialogic arts practice, which has been supported by residencies in arts and non-arts contexts, such as with Los Angeles Alzheimer's Association. Doran has danced for among others, Yvonne Meier (US), Ishmael Huston-Jones (US), Mark Tompkins (F), Mary Fulkerson (D), Bock and Vincenzi (UK) and Arlette George (UK). He
works as a dramaturg and mentor, most recently through the Choreographers In Mentorship Exchange program mentoring Julie Tolentino and currently through The Wellcome Trust, mentoring Catherine Long. Doran is published in dance, film and performance art journals and art publications both as an artist and a scholar. He teaches in higher education and professional dance settings, and curates cutting edge symposia and performance events focused on cultural practices of identity deconstruction.

November 1 Chew On This has been CANCELLED

Please join us on 11.8 for Jose Reynoso

November 8 - Jose Reynoso: Embodiments of Class and the Folk in Eliticizing the Popular and Contructing the Modern; Anna Pavlova in Mexico City (1919)

Jose Reynoso

Embodiments of Class and the Folk in Eliticizing the Popular and constructing the modern: Anna Pavlova in Mexico City (1919)

12pm Kaufman room 160

Nine years after the start of the armed Mexican revolution, Anna Pavlova visited Mexico
City in 1919 already established as a universalized referent of high culture. While engaging in processes of selective re-choreographing through which “low brow” cultural practices are “elevated” to the realm of high art, Pavlova revolutionized concert dance in Mexico City by dancing a popular Mexican folk dance. As a dancing swan representative
of the presumably universal human spirit, Pavlova danced el Jarabe Tapatio on pointe
dressed as a Mexican china poblana. This confluence of the “universal” and the local in
the same body –a body endowed with “artistic genius”- represented the embodiment of
the conundrum that elites in primarily non-white, third-world countries confront as they
engaged in an endless quest to catch up with modernity –technological and scientific- as
they also construct a local identity while trying to gain universal appeal to and resonance
with the civilized first-world. In this paper I will show how Pavlova’s performances of
her Europeanized ballet repertoire and of her “refined” Jarabe Tapatio produced a social
space, a homotopic space, in which a class of similars among Mexican elites re-affirmed
their identities as cultured, civilized moderns –distinctively Mexican, yet with universal
appeal.

Jose Luis Reynoso holds a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) and a M.A. both in Psychology
from California State University Los Angeles and a M.F.A. in Choreography from
UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance where he is currently a Ph.D.
candidate in Culture and Performance Studies. As a choreographer and performer,
Jose has collaborated with performance art and dance artists and his own academic and
choreographic work has been presented nationally and internationally.

10.11.11 - Parthiv Shah: Art as Witness

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Parthiv Shah: Art as Witness
Kaufman Room 160 at 12 noon
Reception to follow in the Rainbow Lounge 

Center for Media and Alternative Communication's (CMAC) role has been to create an interface
between artists from different genres, to facilitate and to provide a platform for production, cultural
exchange of art and ideas, and dialogue in the visual and performing arts. A key objective of the
organization is conceptualizing and implementing specially designed productions mounted on
excellent technological skills. Over nearly a decade the organization has developed projects and
campaigns through different art practices such as new media design, performance, video, public and
community based art and dialogue, sound and other experimental modes of cultural production.
Parthiv Shah will be presenting works in the field of culture, design and media created at the CMAC.

Parthiv Shah is a Fulbright Scholar visiting UCLA from his home in New Delhi, India, where he
serves as the founder-director of the Centre for Media and Alternative Communication. Prof.
Shah is a photographer, filmmaker, and graphic designer. He has made several documentary films,
curated exhibitions, and has several photo-books to his credit, including books on street children
and transgenders in India. He has taught about photography and design in India and beyond,
including at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Growing up in a family of artists and through his own professional training, he brings an interesting intersection of art,
photography and design to his work.

Lately Prof. Shah has been particularly interested and engaged in working on the issue of
image perception and representation. His visual journeys have lead him into working with
communities which are finding a mainstream voice. Parthiv loves traveling, cooking food,
listening to music and flying kites.

Fall Quarter CHEW ON THIS LINE-UP announced

Please join us for the fall quarter series.
More information on each speaker to come!
Tuesdays, 12p-1p
Conference room Kaufman 160

October 11
Parthiv Shah, Fulbright Scholar and Visiting lecturer**
"Art as Witness"
**in Room 208, reception to follow in the Rainbow Lounge

November 1
Dana Marterella

November 8
Jose Reynoso

November 15
Doran George

November 29
Olive McKeon
"Dance and its Negation: On Konzept Tanz and its Discontents"

5.31 : Rosemary Candelario

May 31, 2011
Rosemary Candelario
Eiko & Koma: Choreographing Spaces Apart in Asian America
12pm Kaufman room 160

Choreography inherently theorizes a relationship between bodies and space. My research pushes beyond the reach of the dancing body to the idea that choreography may serve as a nexus of the politics of place and space, constructing a multiplicity of inter-relationships among bodies, sites, and technologies. In my dissertation on the Japanese American dancers, Eiko & Koma, I argue that the pair's choreography does exactly this, effecting as a result new spaces- which I term spaces apart- where alternatives may be performed. Rehearsing my dissertation's main arguments, I will describe the qualities and mechanisms of these spaces apart, each of which evinces a particular choreographic process while concentrating a series of recurring questions asked by Eiko & Koma's body of work. I will demonstrate how the choreographers have for the past forty years generated spaces apart that rework mourning, perform reparation, interrupt nature/culture binaries, and forge intercultural alliances.

Rosemary Candelario is a PhD Candidate in Culture and Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is completing her dissertation on the US-based Japanese dancers, Eiko & Koma. Rosemary earned an MA in Culture and Performance from UCLA in 2007, and a BA in Anthropology and German Language and Literature from Boston University in 1992. Areas of specialization include the Japanese postwar avant-garde movement form butoh, and the Indian classical dance, Bharatanatyam, with research interests in the globalization of these movement forms, and on dance in diaspora, intercultural collaboration, site-specific performance, arts activism, and ideas of place and space. Rosemary published the article "A Manifesto for Moving: Eiko & Koma's Delicious Movement Workshops" in the Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training in 2010. She is also active as a dancer and choreographer.