Guest speaker: Faye Driscoll

This session includes an overview of the classes, plus an overview of the course's guest speakers and an introduction to terms like sensorial engagement, embodied knowledge, and kinesthesia.

Guest speaker: Dr. Evangelina Macias

This session features a conversation with Indigenous scholar Dr. Evangelina Macias who has written about embodied histories as vital to self-knowledge: “…experiences, stories, and ceremonies are the essence of one’s being and the source of their truth…”

Guest speaker: Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This session discusses why documentation matters and explores how criticism has amplified certain kinds of dance while also contributing to erased stories and a whitewashed dance canon.

This session explores collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, including the exhibition for the Doris Duke Theatre created by d. Sabela grimes honoring Octavia Butler. We will discuss intersections of art and activism, storytelling as a form of worldmaking, and relationships between Afrofuturism and creative works by Butler and grimes.

This session discusses themes that have emerged, insights that feel important, and categories of dance: How they are created/who creates them? How might “contemporary dance” invite a way of experiencing dance that is different from “modern dance”? This class will include why/how circus arts, specifically “contemporary circus” like Australia’s Circa, are increasingly presented within “contemporary dance.” 

Guest speaker: Shamel Pitts

This class features a conversation with Shamel Pitts, artistic director of the Afrofuturistic arts collective TRIBE, who is known for creating multidisciplinary performance art works. He has said, “Dancing allows me to share things unseen, unspoken. Dance has been, for me, a bridge to communicate in ways that words have fallen short.”