You are invited to "Dancing in the Archives," a site-specific performance created by students in my Dance History course. Their choreographies are based on archival research the students are conducting on three African American women who shaped the field of modern dance in the 1930s: Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Free and open to the public.
Send your students, bring your classes, come yourself, and spread the word! Would love to have an audience for my students!
This is the second year of this particular collaboration between my Dance History class and the Special Collections (thanks to those who came last year!), in which the archive is not only as a place containing raw material for creating new performances or researching performance history, but also as a site for staging performance. We hope that the project will bring new audiences to dance and debunk and misconceptions about archives as old, dusty, and irrelevant to contemporary artists. The focus of our performance aims to make visible the contributions of women of color to the development of American modern dance. Finally, we are spotlighting the tremendous archival resources we have right here on campus!