Dance

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

Professor and Chair of the Dance Department Hari Krishnan talks with his longtime colleague and friend choreographer Ananya Chatterjea to discuss her upcoming “Feminist Rage and Healing” Movement Workshop on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 8pm.

Ananya Chatterjea অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায় is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016 Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellow, and a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow. She is a Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in Dance Studies and technique.

Hari Krishnan is Chair and Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University. A 2013 Bessie Award nominee in the Outstanding Performance category, he is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator, and is the artistic director of Toronto-based dance company inDANCE. His monograph Celluloid Classicism (2019) recently won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”

Warrior-feminist-dance artist Ananya Chatterjea will lead a seminal and urgent workshop on feminist rage and healing at Wesleyan on March 10, 2021. Why is this workshop important in terms of the complex world we all inhabit today?
While some of the issues we are facing today are old, we are experiencing them in new formations. There is urgency as the ecosystemic balance—both in terms of the extractive economy of capitalism that is destroying our habitat, and in terms of violently stifling emergent voices for justice from long and historically marginalized communities—tips over. Sometimes I think all we have is ourselves, in the manner of brilliant Black queer feminist writer June Jordan’s words: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Yet, we have to practice being there for ourselves—in embodied terms. So we practice the regulation of our over-activated nerves, and we care for ourselves and each other, even as we push back consistently and repeatedly against the violences directed at us. This is a practice, this articulation of rage at what is being done to us and in our name, and the ability not to be burned by its power.

What would you like the participants to take away from this experience?
An embodied knowledge of articulating rage.

Could you discuss the syncretic ways you integrate performance, scholarship and social justice issues?
The injustices that are in front of us are multi-pronged, Hydra-like, constantly reincarnating themselves. Some of these we are sharply opposed to, and some, because they are systemic, we are implicated in, albeit unwittingly. It takes all of the skills I have learned and continue to chisel, to identify them through the culture of shiny consumerist capitalism and convenience, and to invite others to do the same. And to imagine a world without these violences—it takes every cell of my body to practice moving as if these violences were not poisoning our world. It takes deep study, critical analysis, intellectual and practice-based rigor, creative ferment, undoing of old learnings, imaginative flights, it takes everything informing each other.

We hope you join us for this movement workshop experience on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 8pm. Reservations are limited to 40 people and are free through the Center for the Arts box office.

Fiona Coffey
Associate Director for Programming and Performing Arts
Center for the Arts

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week, Chair of the Dance Department and Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Hari Krishnan introduces the four choreographers that will be featured in the Fall Faculty Dance Concert “The Perseverance Project” on Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 8pm as they share more about their work. 

The Dance Department’s fall faculty dance concert The Perseverance Project features our new extraordinary dance faculty. Milka Djordjevich, Doug Elkins, Maho Ishiguro, and Shamel Pitts will share their vibrant choreography along with fascinating insights into their creative processes and collaborative adventures. The Perseverance Project promises to be a spectacular virtual evening of dynamic dance, urgent political concerns, thoughtful representations of dance history, and much more. We invite you to engage with these brilliant artists.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Milka Djordjevich
“I create choreography that operates inside and outside dance traditions in order to blur the distinction between ‘dance’ and ‘non-dance.’ In particular, I am interested in subverting Western dance’s history, tradition, codification, and embedded patriarchy, without creating transgressions. I participate in a long and layered process of inquiry, which continually questions the mode of production from which I work in order to examine how it is embedded in a cultural hierarchy. In the form of a self-narrated pseudo video essay, in collaboration with filmmaker Justin Streichman, we visit my garage/studio in Los Angeles, where I currently reside. There I unpack performance remnants as a lamentation of past work and reflect on the impossible return to live performance as we knew it. My last completed work, Kinetic Augmentations (2019)—a solo made in correspondence with Fluxus Artist Alison Knowles’s House of Dust at the MAK Center/Schindler House in Los Angeles—reflects my practice, a going-between of a domestic/private environment to a performative/public reality. I reflect on what was, what is, and what can be.”

Visiting Associate Professor of Dance Doug Elkins
“I began my dance career as a b-boy, house head, capoeirista, and voguing. By the time I came into New York’s contemporary dance scene, I had thoroughly absorbed the hip hop ethos of bricolage, appropriation, sampling, and remixing. I revel in the way that the resonance of dance forms changes as they are put into new contexts and layered alongside and through one another. My dances have been called ‘supercolliders where dissonant cultural referents create a cultural Big Bang.’ I am interested in multiplicity. I make dances that hopefully attempt to represent the world as a tangle or jumble or ball of yarn, to represent the world without in any way diminishing the essential complexity of it or, to put it better, the simultaneous presence in it of very disparate elements that converge to determine each event.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Maho Ishiguro MA ’12 Ph.D. ’18 
“I am performing a piece called Gambyong Retnokusumo, a court style Javanese dance piece from the royal court of Mangkunegaran, Solo, Indonesia. The dance was choreographed during the reign of Mangkunegaran VIII (1944–1987), and depicts a young woman of coming of age, adoring herself, and glowing in her beauty. I am also sharing some aspects of my current research on dances from Indonesia. Audiences should definitely attend this concert to witness the strength, wonder, and hope the diversity of our dance styles bring to Wesleyan, to our students, and the world beyond.”

Visiting Instructor in Dance Shamel Pitts
“My choreographic aesthetic is fundamentally connected to Gaga, the movement language created by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. As an artist and citizen, I have a large curiosity towards deviation. This inspires me to make movement-based art that reflects its time. The work that I will share for The Perseverance Project exclusively is a behind the scenes intimate viewing of the creation process for my most recent work in progress duet Touch Of RED, which was filmed by art cinematographer Taylor Antisdel with performers Tushrik Fredericks and myself. All filming was within the most updated COVID-19 safety protocols at New Live Arts.”

Fall Faculty Dance Concert: The Perseverance Project
Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 8pm
FREE! RSVP required for access to virtual event.

 

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week we focus on a virtual residency at Wesleyan featuring The Era Footwork Crew from Chicago.

I first saw The Era Footwork Crew perform in November 2019 at Links Hall in Chicago. The show, In the Wurkz, was an extraordinary combination of Chicago footwork, live DJs, spoken word, documentary film, and community spirit. I was struck by how The Era had been able to integrate every aspect of its ambitious artistic mission into one inspiring and beautifully crafted performance. The energy emanating from the audience, comprised of family, friends, neighbors, and children from The Era’s youth footwork summer camps, was palpable. The show was a love letter to the local neighborhoods which have supported The Era and a message of hope to the youth. This was a remarkable model of how the arts can truly strengthen and uplift a local community, and it felt urgent that Wesleyan students and the Center for the Arts audience be able to learn from this group of dedicated artists and community activists.

Footwork is an improvisational, competition-style form that encompasses music, dance, and a distinct Chicago culture. It is an inter-generational, community-based artform that is taught and passed down through dance battles, clubs, house parties, dance downs, and recently formalized through youth summer camps on the south side of Chicago. The Era is known not only for their incredible mastery and elevation of Chicago footwork but also for their social justice initiatives. The Era proclaims to anyone who will listen that “footwork saves lives.” They mean this in the most literal and non-hyperbolic sense possible. This saying is what drives an extraordinary partnership between The Era Footwork Crew and their non-profit, Open the Circle (OTC). OTC takes its name from crowded Chicago dance floors. When the floor gets overly packed, two people will lock hands and spin through the crowd–“opening the circle”–to make space for dancing. In this spirit, OTC is committed to opening tightly-knit circles of power and resources in society, re-centering them to benefit artists and youth in divested communities. The Era and OTC work hand-in-hand to promote dance education, document the development of footwork, recover and highlight women’s contributions to the artform, and elevate the visibility of footwork through performance. At Wesleyan, The Era and OTC will talk to students and our audience about how footwork has the ability to truly transform and, indeed, save lives.

The Era will join us this fall for a series of virtual engagements. On Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 7pm, there will be a documentary film screening, “Footwork on Film.” Dance filmmakers Brandon Calhoun and Wills Glasspiegel have been documenting the art and history of Chicago footwork for the last decade. They will share a series of short film clips from their archive, introducing the audience to The Era Footwork Crew, the cultural history of footwork in Chicago, and the rise of the dance form.

This event will be followed by a footwork technique workshop on Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 7pm. The Era Footwork Crew will give an introductory dance workshop, open and accessible to everyone regardless of dance background or experience, followed by a community conversation with the Hartford-based street dance collective 860MVMNT. The Era and 860MVMNT will explore differences in regional dance styles and how community culture can give rise to dance forms. They will also talk about their respective youth education initiatives and the impact they have had in the Chicago and Hartford communities.

Finally, on Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 7pm, Open the Circle will join members of the Wesleyan Dance Department for a panel discussion on OTC’s community engagement work and racial justice initiatives in the south side of Chicago.

Please join us for a dynamic series of virtual engagements that immerses our audiences in Chicago footwork and The Era’s racial justice work. We hope this introduction to The Era inspires you to join us again in fall 2021, when The Era will be in residence on the Wesleyan campus to perform In the Wurkz and engage with Wesleyan students and our regional community.

Fiona Coffey
Associate Director for Programming and Performing Arts
Center for the Arts

The Era Footwork Crew Residency Events at Wesleyan

 

Minneapolis-based artist Patrick Scully had invited Center for the Arts Virtual Artist in Residence Eiko Otake and her collaborator John Killacky to screen and have a conversation about their work Elegies, centered around the death of their mothers, on May 29 at a virtual cabaret. Four days before that event, George Floyd was killed by police, followed by protests and riots. It was under this tension that the event took place.

“The murders upset the victims, their families, their communities, and all of us. When our mothers died, we were sad but we were not angry. Now we are angry. We will attend to this anger and we will remember this anger,” said Otake.

Read an edited transcript and view sections of the presentation in Eiko Otake’s Wesleyan CFA Virtual Studio.

 

 

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week we begin to highlight the recent work of Eiko Otake, a long-time friend of Wesleyan and mine, and our first CFA Virtual Artist-in-Residence.

At the onset of the pandemic, we took time to look for past reference points to guide us forward in this moment; and to consider how some of the artists we have worked with might help us process our present situation. Among these, none has engaged with us for as long, or in as many profound and different ways, as Eiko Otake, who regards “Body as a landscape and Landscape as a body,” and who has made a life’s work of contemplating grief.

Eiko first performed at Wesleyan as Eiko & Koma in 2002 with Offering, a three-hour performative ritual of sustained mourning after 9/11. She dove deep into the idea of body/landscape with A Body in Places, which included performances in Wesleyan’s Olin Library and Van Vleck Observatory. In 2017–18, Eiko was a Think Tank Fellow in the College of the Environment, which was focused on themes of disaster and human-environment relationships. Her ongoing collaboration with Wesleyan professor William Johnston brought them repeatedly to post-nuclear disaster Fukushima. In addition, Eiko regularly teaches an interdisciplinary course focused on movement and massive violence, and this has introduced her over the years to many young collaborators, artists, audience members, curators, and friends. As a result, The Duet Project, begun in 2017, features many alumni, including Alexis Moh ’15, Nora Thompson ’15, DonChristian Jones ’12, and Iris McCloughan ’10.

Like most performing artists, Eiko’s upcoming performances and works-in-development have been cancelled or postponed. So upon returning to Japan mid-March, and entering into self-quarantine, Eiko embraced the opportunity to collaborate with Wesleyan on this new experiment. 

Below are links to a Virtual Studio, developed by Eiko and Allison Hsu ’19, that carries Eiko’s works, reflections, collaborators’ voices, and dialogues with others through her virtual residency.

This week’s highlights are:

What is Virtual Studio?
Room
On Artists and War
Conversation with Bill T. Jones

In this time of uncertainty, in a field reliant on connection for survival, we are called to work together and to be a community of care for one another. We invite you to spend time with us in Eiko’s Virtual Studio, where your feedback and reflections are welcomed and appreciated.

Jennifer Calienes
Interim Director
Center for the Arts

 

History and Personal Note

Eiko and I shared a mentor and friend in Sam Miller ’74, who many of us are missing greatly right now. Eiko and Sam had a way of guiding one another simultaneously—a partnership and deep collaboration that influenced both of their careers and wove its way in and out of Wesleyan in profound and long-lasting ways. 

It is through their collaboration that I was introduced, as a 1994 intern at Jacob’s Pillow, to the work of Eiko & Koma. Years later, again under Sam’s guidance, I would get to know Eiko as an advisor to the National Dance Project, a program I managed at the New England Foundation for the Arts. Eiko was the highlight of our meetings. There were sometimes tears and, at least one time, pounding fists on the table, as advisors were asked to keep silent during the panel deliberations. Eiko helped us realize how problematic this was, and we adapted.

True collaboration, I’ve learned through trial and error, is built on trust and communication. It takes time, makes room for reflection, and leans into complexity and nuance. And as Eiko described in her American Dance Festival program notes for The Duet Project, “difference is an engine of inquiry.” 

Between 2006 and 2009, as Director of the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, I had the privilege of working closely with Eiko & Koma through our Living Legacy program on the development of Cambodia Stories, Hunger, and the Retrospective Project. It may have looked from afar that we were supporting Eiko & Koma, but we were really learning from them. 

Since that first performance some 25 years ago, I have often longed for opportunities to experience Eiko’s work as an antidote to an overly busy and fast-paced life. I crave time to consider shape and texture, skin and body, breath and pace, and Eiko’s profound ability to make one feel absolutely present with her. 

As we collectively pause, reflect, and re-imagine how to move forward, my hope is that we slow down to really absorb our time, body, and landscape—and maybe one day—we will catch up to her.

Visit Eiko’s Virtual Studio.

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