Improvisational Crossings: Social Dance as Interdisciplinary Intervention

Summary

This microseminar serves as preparation for and engagement with an April 2018 colloquium that brings together six dance/ing scholars for two days of lectures, workshops, and dialogue that address border crossings through the lens of improvisational social dances. The microseminar includes visits with important voices in Dance Studies including Jasmine Johnson, Kareem Khubchandani, and Marta Savigliano. The course includes a brief overview of how social dancing has been historically framed, followed by an introduction to the colloquium participants’ various engagements with social dance. By looking at social dance less as a fixed, static category, and more as a term that describes the relationality produced through movement practices, this microseminar asks students to examine dances of togetherness, or “together dancing,” and to think how this dancing can be both lens and method for engaging in interdisciplinary inquiry. The course thinks at the intersection of conventional disciplinary divisions, by centering improvisation as an analytic that can challenge Dance Studies’ historical investments in the choreographic while simultaneously calling upon an embodied conceptualization not traditionally present in Music and Sound Studies.

In addition to attending all scheduled meetings, the lectures and dance workshops, students will be asked to complete reading assignments in advance of seminar meetings and write a short final reflection. For more information contact Jade Power Sotomayor (jyps@uw.edu).

Meeting Times and Location

• Friday, March 30, 4:30-6:30 pm
• Friday, April 6, 4:30-6:30 pm
• Friday, April 13, 5-7 pm--Meeting with visiting guests
• Saturday, April 14, 10 am-5 pm--Colloquium Research Presentations and Roundtable
• Sunday, April 15, 12-6 pm--Dance Workshops at Washington Hall
• Friday, April 20, 4:30-6:30 pm

All sessions aside from the colloquium weekend will meet in Communications 218D.

Naomi Bragin is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell, where she teaches courses in Black Performance Theory, performance research, and dance improvisation. Her current project, Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics, traces the role of freestyle street dance in the generation of Black political aesthetics.

Juliet McMains is Professor of Dance at UW Seattle and the author of Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce (2015) and Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (2006).

Jade Power Sotomayor is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell. She is a performance scholar and practitioner writing and teaching about US Latinx performance and a Puerto Rican bomba cultural worker and dancer. Her current project is titled ¡Habla!: Speaking Bodies in Latinx Dance and Performance.