BALLET IN TIMES OF CHANGE or why the pleasant face?
My current research seeks to understand the relationship of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in arts education and specifically the genealogy of ballet culture. Using my robust experience as a dancer trained in western classical dance, this class is a space to explore how ballet is centered globally, even in the ecology of contemporary dance practice. The course opens up questions about pleasure and embodying time signatures: Zen Jefferson co-facilitates the space with critical teasing through musical offerings mixed live in the studio.
Using ballet technique, the class deconstructs and interrupts the flows of ballet, that is, of capital and the toxins packed inside a form that routinely exploits its participants. Class is a laboratory that tunes in to directions of power moving inside the ballet studio. Curiosity about power is a tool to find a path away from imperialist standards. If transparency among all participants is a goal, what must be sacrificed? Making this bridge between practice and theory, we call upon the voices of thinkers on abolition and other feminist necessities.
COURSE IN PROGRESS
Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)
POSITIONING OF THE RESEARCH
Important texts:
Encyclopédie — ed. Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste le Rond D'Alembert — An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance — Joann Kealiinohomoku — The Cecchetti Method of Classical Ballet: Theory and Technique — Cyril W. Beaumont — Seeing Race Again — ed. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, George Lipsitz — Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom — bell hooks — Digging: The Africanist Presence in American Performance Dance and Other Contexts — Brenda Dixon Gottschild — Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia —Sabrina Strings — The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma — Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. — Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants — Robin Wall Kimmerer