Project Abstract
defrantz and Dohoney announce a project to foster new collaborations between dance and music studies scholar-practitioners at Northwestern. Due to structural conditions and institutional constraints, dance and music have yet to be in meaningful conversation despite a their entangled and mutually dependent histories. Thinking with the holistic concept-practice of ngoma (a Bantu word encompassing both music and dance), the PIs will the productive intersections and tensions between their fields to reflect on the matter of Black abstraction as an aesthetico-political force for social change in our contemporary moment.
Investigators
thomas f. defrantz
thomas f. defrantz Directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Creative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker. Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; SNDO; Juilliard; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Duke, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016. slippage.org
Ryan Dohoney
Ryan Dohoney is Associate Professor of Musicology, Director of Graduate Music Studies and affiliate faculty in Critical Theory, Comparative Literary Studies, the Black Arts Consortium, and the German Department. He writes on US and European modernism and experimentalism with a special focus on the intimate affective ties and friendships that hold together artistic communities. He is the author of two books: Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel and Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde. His current project reconstructs the musical communities of Julius Eastman in New York City in the 1970s & 80s, focusing in particular on the power of the Black Radical Tradition in his work and its misrecognition in the musician’s ongoing revival.