DANCE, HISTORY & PERFORMANCE RESEARCH
RECENT TALKS
Fire and Light: Interdisciplinary Artist-Producers with Bek Berger
Monday, January 16, 2023, Fourth Space
Fire and Light, a series of public conversations that brings artists together with Concordia faculty members, discusses guest speakers’ creative practices in performance, sculpture, bio art, video, social practice and visual art, as well as their crucial work as producers of major international festivals, conferences and performances. This series curated by Meghan Moe Beitiks offers a unique opportunity for the Concordia community to be in dialogue with the international artist/producers with roots in or relationships to Latvia, Germany and greater Europe.
For this event, artist Bek Berger will be in conversation with VK Preston to discuss various disciplinary perspectives on creative process, professional practices, and conceptual concerns when engaging with performance, music, material, and other forms.
Please click here for further information and a recording
Intangible Baroques in Natural History: Entangled Indigenous and Settler Knowledge in Early Archives
Monday, December 5, 2022, Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University
Prof. VK Preston at York University Graduate Dance Department Symposium Series Winter, 2019
Exploring baroque performance and histories of racialization, this paper on ballet and colonization examines travel writing alongside early modern dance records. Addressing masks, matter, and the metaphorical blackening and whitening of alchemy, I inflect this study of performance’s remains with analyses of race and religious difference evidenced in ballet’s records, traversing histories of the expulsion of minority populations, gender fluidity, and baroque performance.
Please click here for further information
CULTURAL HISTORY, PERFORMANCE & POLITICS: A DIALOGUE
SEPTEMBER 14, 2018 at NYU Tisch School of the Arts
In light of the "post-truth" politics governing current events, this panel invites historians and performance theorists to discuss historical approaches and methods for studying the politics of performance. With the aim of better understanding how memory (individual and collective) has been mobilized in a variety of political performances of the past and what this implies for the present and the future of both politics and performance, scholars from the NYU Performance Studies department will join with historians from the International Society for Cultural History to discuss recent shifts in the theorization of performance relative to developments in transnational and "connected” histories.
Panelists include: Alessandro Arcangeli (Univ. Verona), Christian Biet (Univ. Paris-Nanterre, NYU), Elizabeth Claire (CNRS-EHESS, Paris), Mariem Guellouz (Univ. Paris-Descartes), Felicia McCarren (Tulane Univ.), Ida Meftahi (Univ. of Maryland), VK Preston (Univ. of Toronto), Richard Schechner (NYU PS), and Diana Taylor (NYU PS).
Please click here for further information
EMBODIMENT, EVIDENCE, AND SORCERY/INCORPORATION, SORCELLERIE ET PREUVE
MAY 24, 2018 at Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris
Embodiment, Evidence and Sorcery, a half-day study organized by Elizabeth Claire (History of Gender), around research by VK Preston (University of Toronto, Canada).
This session will take as a case study the Ballet de la Relivrance Renaud "danced by His Majesty in the Grand 'Salle du Louvre Sunday, January 29, 1617". The analysis of ballet and its archives highlight the 1617 trial of Leonora Galigai accused of defamatory and theatrical texts and is suspected of being witch and Jewish. This meeting with the libels proposes a debate with VK Preston who will present her ongoing research on the cultural history of dance, law and gender.
Please click here for further information
VISUAL CULTURE WORKSHOP
MARCH 8 - 9, 2018 at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
What theories, methodologies, fields of evidence, and habits of mind can we bring to bear on the intersection of visual culture and performance studies?
With Visiting Scholars and Michigan Faculty: Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University), VK Preston (University of Toronto), Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Hentyle Yapp (New York University), Sara Blair (English), Clare Croft (Dance), Anna Watkins Fisher (American Culture) Ruby Tapia (English), Emily Wilcox (Asian Languages and Cultures).
Please click here for further information
WITCH ARCHIVES: FEELING, TEXT, AND EMBODIMENT
JULY 27, 2016 9 at The University of Melbourne
Studying a political crisis through records of early danced theatre, this book chapter, developed through this fellowship with History of the Emotions, uses performance and criminal records to examine high profile histories of early seventeenth century witch allegations in France. Writing on theories of power inscribed in records of emotion and embodiment, this work on performances equating Crusades and witch trials exposes hidden histories of politics and early modern sovereignty.
Please click here for further information
BAROQUE RELATIONS: PERFORMANCE AND EXTRACTIVISM IN CIRCUM-ATLANTIC WORLDS, 1626
DECEMBER 8, 2015 at Yale University
“Baroque Relations” investigates precious metals associated with Andean mining in the archives of early modern ballets in France. Identifying events and tropes of Inca protest within early French ballet, this study situates dances in an Atlantic world vortex, drawing the ‘parts of the world’ into international political disputes, extractivism, and scenes of Indigenous and African slavery. The work invokes a ‘performative commons’ (Maddock Dillon) of an early baroque-era, addressing global circulations of metals through proto-industrial mining, trade, and ecology as well as performance in the early modern Anthropocene. This talk is based on a chapter from my current book project, expanding my research on performance and aesthetics of emergent sites of global trade and capital. Another essay on these sources is forthcoming in a collected volume edited by Mark Franko, with Oxford University Press.