The Dancer's Body as Canvas or Kinetic Sculpture
May
28
7:00 PM19:00

The Dancer's Body as Canvas or Kinetic Sculpture

Merce Cunningham's dances often demonstrated unique approaches to dance costuming. His collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, Summerspace (1958) layers abstract designs on the body, while Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo's costumes for Scenario (1997) frame the body with bulbous sculptural forms. Discussing these works highlights costuming strategies and raises questions about the relationship between movement and clothing on and off stage.  Free at the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, NC>

View Event →
Book Presentation @ Duke University MFA Program
Oct
18
1:30 PM13:30

Book Presentation @ Duke University MFA Program

In this presentation, I share historical and ethnographic research on divine gifts that are experienced by Pentecostals during communal rituals which feature driving music, auto-affective techniques, and dissociative states. Such gifts include glossolalia or “speaking in tongues”, faith healing, snake-handling, and ecstatic movement. I discuss the beliefs that frame the believer’s understanding of such experiences—pneumatology, soteriology, and eschatology—and consider the cultural significance of the tradition in the American South. This presentation will be accompanied by exercises in auto-affective uses of voice and gesture that were developed while researching an interdisciplinary performance work that engages aspects of the tradition.

View Event →