Browsing by Department "Fine Art Dance - Masters"

My Moving New Futures workshop uses improvisatory movement to help social justice practitioners—organizers, activists, civil rights lawyers, and others—imagine new possibilities for a just society. The workshop grew out of my own backgrounds in dance and social justice work. It has two major philosophical underpinnings: (1) the radical imagination necessary for prison-industrial complex abolition and (2) the growing body of scholarship showing that our entire bodies, not just our brains, produce thought. Facilitating the workshop for two separate groups of social justice practitioners, I recorded discussion portions and used a survey to gather data. Discussions and survey responses affirmed my hope that movement would be a source of new knowledge and imagination for social justice practitioners. After these two iterations, I performed a public lecture-demonstration in which I discussed the development of the workshop and results. In a co-creative process with practitioners, I will continue developing the workshop as a tool for their work.

Human-caused environmental destruction is the result of a life rhythm that requires numbing to ecological impact. Through my Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis Thesis, I have developed my dance practice, begun a community practice, and curated a performance, portal obscura, all investigating ecological relations through dance. Ecological relation is defined as focusing attention on the relations between living creatures (flora, fauna, fungi, and bacteria) and their environment (including land, air, water, and objects). I propose an ecological dance aesthetic that moves with an expanded sense of time, space, and selfhood while interweaving worlds of reality and imagination. Through this research project, I developed a dance practice that honed my awareness and sensation of self and ecological relationality. I shared my practice in a solo performance, portal obscura, where I invited the audience to traverse the performance space and interact with poetry and sculptures devised to enhance the ecological awareness of situating, observing, and relating. I stress that noticing connections and making communities across differences are essential first steps to a less human-centric environmental ethic.