SPRING 2024, Thursdays, 5:00-8:00PM; HYBRID WITH IN-PERSON MEETINGs AT MIT
As a planned orchestration of bodies in motion, can choreography offer insights into social interactions, political strategies and human being-in-the-world? In “Choreographies of Protest” (2003), Susan Foster suggests that established patterns of bodily movement can be impactful engagements with structures of power, and that critical reflection on these patterns has the potential to offer social theory that reaches beyond dance. More recently, however, Erica Chenoweth (2022) has found that the fast-paced mobilization of protest movements facilitated by social-media campaigns has in fact created movements without solid foundations to support sustained resistance, diminishing the impact, effectiveness and durability of people-power social change movements. What light might a choreographic consideration of contemporary activist organizing and mobilizing shed on today’s pressing political concerns and on the dominant power structures with which they are reckoning? Why and how are protest movements and resistance interventions orienting towards their stated goals and how do their intentions measure-up to their impact? These questions will be our course guides as we consider social change interventions as orchestrated political and social engagements enacted by bodies that are mobilized in intentional ways.
In this “movement seminar” we will explore dance-inflected movement exercises drawn from site-specific improvisation, modern dance, African folkloric and vernacular dances, meditative flow, and play to generate insights from the body into the kinds of socio-political resistances–subtle and radical-that choreography, in a broad sense, can enact. Our approach to these insights will be informed by methods and theories from the fields of socio-cultural anthropology and critical dance studies. Whether it be observing through hands-on or “body-in” participation, or exploring foundational thinking about “choreography,” “performance,” “resistance,” “protest” and “power” we will use social-cultural anthropology and critical dance studies as touchstones for considering the following questions: What and how do performing bodies “signify”? Can a collection of performing bodies make change in and on their social and political milieux? Can choreography theorize corporeal, individual and social identities? Does choreography construct and can it de-construct race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality? How have performing bodies been trained? And has that training had an impact on performers and their social surrounds beyond the choreographies that they enact? The suggestion underlying these questions is that choreographies can and do, in fact, have the potential for potent social,cultural, political and economic interventions. By considering these questions carefully, we will in this course engage with choreographic scholarship that emerges from the moving body and that culminates in creative and critical work applicable both on stage and off.
Faculty
Sharon Kivenko is a scholar and performance artist. She got her PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2016. Sharon’s research and art live at the intersections of performance, embodiment, and social belonging. Her work as an ethnographer, as a professor, and as a dance-artist moves distally from the body to consider the kinds of social encounters that influence and determine individual and communal being-in-the world. The main focus of Sharon’s academic research has been on the performed ways in which professional dancers and musicians from Mali, West Africa garner social recognition in local, national, and transnational arena. Her research is part of a larger set of scholarly efforts in dance studies, social anthropology, and gender studies to highlight the complex relations among arts production, labor, migration, and citizenship; relations that themselves illuminate how paying attention to somatic modes of being in the world reveal nuanced perspectives on race, gender, class and sexuality.