Dance Studies Working Group 2009 "Risking Histories"
All Welcome! This year we will combine the ATHE "risk" theme with the Performance Studies Focus Group's questions of history and performance. Among the questions we will consider are: What are the "risks" that dance (including historical research, performance, and choreography) has not taken and why? Does dance's "disciplinarity" restrict its potential innovation in larger arenas of the humanities and sciences? What is the risk of "history" in dance studies? How might the critical methods of performance studies challenge and complicate dance histories, research, and choreography? How might we use "choreography" to probe and challenge performance studies and histories?
Please note we may try to see a performance on Thursday night or meet with local dancers and scholars for a performance/discussion. If you have any questions or a performance to recommend, please contact Katherine Mezur. Convener: Katherine Mezur Co-Curator: Kate Elswit
The Mixed Media Working Group's primary goal is to gather informaton about mixed media performance and pedagogy. Working group sessions inovlve sharing information among participants to keep scholars apprised of developments in mixed media performance worldwide. Coordinator: Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
The Music as Performance Working Group takes non-theatrical musical performance (that is, concerts and similar performances of music rather than musical theatre or opera, not restricted to live forms) in any musical genre as its main objects of inquiry. Coordinator: Elizabeth Patterson
The Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Performance Working Group addresses the use of recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive science in performance studies methodologies. Coordinator: Rhonda Blair
The Performance and Ethnography Working Group is dedicated to the advancement of ethnography as a methodology for performance studies. Group discussions in the past have focused on practical considerations for conducting fieldwork, a call for the need of an ethical approach to ethnographic research, as well as suggestions about how to implement ethnographic practices within a performance studies paradigm. Coordinator: Kevin Brown
In the spirit of this year’s preconference topic “On History and Performance,” the Performance Historiography group will hold its inaugural meeting to ponder the relationship between performance and history. The working group’s aim is to recognize the discipline of performance history and its challenges, to interpret what new paradigm arises from transcending traditional boundaries between theory and historiography, and to elucidate our personal relationship to our work—as scholars, as artists, as people.
At the 2009 meeting we will embark upon issues of evidence. We’ll discuss what kind of evidence we use in our work and how we employ it. What strategies do we employ to uncover evidence? How do we embody evidence in our writing? How does evidence help us unveil the constructedness of the histories we document? What is evidence, and more importantly, what isn’t?
As we permit these questions to send our brains brimming with individual archives, we will also consider W.B. Worthen’s recent critique of Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire so that we might reevaluate our own evidentiary experiences.
Please feel free to contact Megan Shea with any questions.
The Philosophy and Performance Working Group seeks to unravel the relationship between philosophy and performance, utilizing discussion and debate to clarify the interrelatedness of different tropes in philosophy. Coordinator: Joseph Cermatori
For more information on the Working Group Sessions for this year, please contact Louise Owen.
