Readings

Session #1 - October 22, 2024

Bellow, Juliet and Nell Andrew. "Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe." In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren. Routledge, 2015.

Session #2 - December 3, 2024

Getsy, David J. "Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction." In Queer Abstraction, exh. cat., edited by Jared Ledesma. Des Moines Art Center, 2019.

Session #3 - March 4, 2025

Gutierrez, Miguel. "Does Abstraction Belong to White People?" BOMB, November 7, 2018. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2018/11/07/miguel-gutierrez-1/.

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2018/11/07/miguel-gutierrez-1/

Session #4 - April 8, 2025

Edwards, Adrienne. "Blackness in Abstraction." Art In America (January 2015): 62-69.

Session #5 - May 27, 2025

Readings from 2022-2023 season

Session #1 - October 3, 2023

Adeyemi, Kemi. “The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1, 2019): 545–67. 

Session #2 - November 14, 2023

Jackson, Naomi M. “Educating Dancers with Dignity, Respect, and Care .” Chapter. In Dance and Ethics: Moving Towards a More Humane Culture, 57–91. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Session #3 - February 6, 2024

Osterweis, Ariel. "The muse of virtuosity: Desmond Richardson, race, and choreographic falsetto." Dance Research Journal 45.3 (2013): 53-74.

Session #4 - April 2, 2024

Kraut, Anthea. “The Dance-In and the Re/Production of White Corporeality.” The International Journal of Screendance 10 (2019): 15-51. https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v10i0.6514.

Session #5 - May 21, 2024

Sedgman, Kirsty. On the Reasonable Audience. Springer International Publishing, 2018. Chapters 1, 3 & 5.

Readings from 2022-2023 season

Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies by Ananya Chatterjea

Selected Chapters:

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Introduction

• Chapter 4: Germaine Acogny: Convective Heat and Ground Shift in Contemporary African Dance

• Chapter 8: Lemi Ponifasio, Camille Brown, Prumsodon Ok, Alice Sheppard: Constellatory Heat and Light on Alterity (only pages 246-254 on the work of Alice Sheppard)

Session #2  - December 13, 2022 - 

Funding Bodies by Sarah Wilbur 

Selected Excerpts:

• Preface 

• Introduction: Institutions Motivate Movement

• Chapter 3: Disinvesting in Dance: The NEA’s Neoliberal Turn (1997-2016)

• Afterword: Does the NEA Need Saving? Endowment and Collective Repair

Additional Reading:

• NEA 2022 Grant Announcement-Dance. This document lists NEA grant winners in dance for the first cycle of the 2022 fiscal year. 

• NEA 1966 Dance Grants. This document lists NEA's first grant winners in dance.

The entire book is open access and can be found here: https://www.weslpress.org/9780819580528/funding-bodies/

Check out the viewings for our December meeting.

Session #3  - February 28, 2023 (Date changed!)

Eco Soma by Petra Kuppers 

Selected Chapters:

• Introducing Eco Soma (12 pages)

• Chapter 3: Un/Bounding: Writing Water Worlds (49 pages)

• Chapter 4: Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays: Speculative Embodiment (43 pages)

Check out the viewings for our February meeting.

Session #4 - April 18, 2023

Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop by Imani Kai Johnson

Selected Chapters:

Introduction: Dark Matter, Breaking Cyphers

Chapter 1: Dark Matter and Diaspora: Cyphers in an Africanist Context

Chapter 4: Dancing Global Hip Hop: Negotiating Difference and Traditions in Cyphers

Session #5 - June 20, 2023

Selections from What A Body Can Do and Blue Sky Body by Ben Spatz. 

What A Body Can Do:

Introduction: What Can A Body Do? (21 pages) 

Chapter 5: Embodied Research in the University (33 pages)

Blue Sky Body: 

Thresholds (46 pages)

Notes for Decolonizing Embodiment (14 pages)