10/09/2023
You are cordially invited to attend the second talk of the fall Dance Studies Colloquium season, Thursday, October 12, 2023, at 3pm (EST). Free and open to the public, this talk will take place at the Chapel of the Chaplains (TPAC Chapel), North Broad Street and Polett Walk, Temple University, Philadelphia. It will also be live streamed and archived.
Direct link: https://youtube.com/live/TVnlg5Kjyp8?feature=share
Laura Katz Rizzo, Dance, Temple University
“Performing Witchcraft: Feminist Art Practice and Embodied Research Processes”
Abstract:
In this presentation I will describe my interdisciplinary, multi-modal, creative, feminist praxis of dance research; and the creative process I have developed for embodied, self-reflexive, somatic, meaning making. I will examine how the concepts of performing witchcraft, and spell casting, and in their correspondent interconnections with dance and choreography, have enabled me to utilize the choreographic craft as a recursive form of inquiry for understanding the world around me. With it, I articulate a personal voice to create meaning and craft narrative using formal structures borrowed from occult ritual and theatrical stagecraft. In this talk, I speak from a personal, poststructuralist, and feminist stance to describe how this holistic approach has challenged my ways of thinking, being, seeing, and dancing, and helped me recognize, question, and transgress overarching ideological paradigms within the field of dance, in myself, and in society at large. Both in content and form, my work has led me toward processes of integration and synthesis (rather than deconstruction). Thus, my identities as dancer, teacher, choreographer, scholar, artist, mother, woman, and witch, have become more fully aligned, bound, balanced, and integrated. Connectivity has therefore emerged as a significant motif central to my work’s meaning, appearance, and to the processes of its making, as evidenced in examples drawn from my choreography and installations.
