BODY BASED THEORY PRACTICE
BODY BASED THEORY PRACTICE is an open source term for situating somatic practices, dance rituals, body-based exercises in the context of feminist, queer, critical race, and crip theory. It is something that has underscored my development as a teacher, artist, and human and came to into focus while attaining my MFA in Interdisciplinary dance performance.
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Articles:
"The body as series of boundaries: developing interventions in performativity through dance practices"
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_FRAMEWORK
Critical theorists from many disciplines propose that we formulate our identities through repeated quotations, embodied gestures and acts that circulate and reinforce one another. These things are understood as individual but enacted collectively and reinforce interlocking systems and modes of being that further systems of domination, exploitation and violence but also (maybe more hopefully) forms of resistance, disruption, reimagining.
As a dance artist, it is interesting to conceive and reconceive of bodily conditioning and training and discrepancies between conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, complicit and coerced. This learned “repertoire of life” is part of everyday existence but is also the very practice of dance - repeated bodily motions, repeated hierarchies, repeated and reinforced trajectories. Queer theorists and gender theorists suggest ways in which we can reorient or subvert our embodied inclinations. Is/can dance be a hopeful intervention in the space between conscious and unconscious? And in what form? A workshop? A forum? A Performance? A protest?
In cross-pollinating feminist and queer theory with physical practice, it is my intent to propose that the practice is the theory itself and the theory is the practice --that it is in the doing/experiencing that the theory is manifest and activated.
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_RESEARCH STRANDS IN THE FORM OF WORKSHOPS
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MIRROR/ WINDOW/ RIFT
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(more info coming)
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_RESOURCES (reading)
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Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed
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Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
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The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam
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In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam
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Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
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“’Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” by E. Patrick Johnson
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Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and Future of Polyqueer Sexualities by Mimi Schippers
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A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
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Patricia Hill-Collins
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Many things by Audre Lorde
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and much more to be added. . .
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_ARTISTS CITED
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Deborah Hay
Ralph Lemon
Darrel Jones
Tuning Scores (Lisa Nelson and Karen Nelson)
Tere O'Connor
(more coming)
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_PLAYLISTS
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_THINGS THAT SHAPED MY THINKING AROUND THIS. . .
a million loud music shows
mosh pits
riot grrl
rhizomatic philosophy
anti-war protests
anti-racist activism and training (Catalyst Project SF)
new orleans participatory culture
poetry
all my students
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