Dance Queering Strategies

Registration for MR Friends opens March 16! >>>Become an MR Friend!
Registration for the general public opens on March 23.

This workshop is offered on a sliding scale of $200-$300.
Participants must register for the full workshop, there are no drop-ins.

Queer as adjective, verb, and noun: What might make a performance action queer? What is it to queer performance? What constitutes a queering?

The workshop will rely on discourse, both choreographic and verbal, as a means of critical reflection of our own taken-for-granted assumptions about dance, choreography and performance, as well as the normative assumptions of the traditions in which we each participate.

Participants will develop palettes of materials—movement, ideas, questions—via directed improvisation, then experiment to find different strategies for organizing the materials. We’ll then bring those explorations forward through performance-making experiments that center on the queering of form and process – irrespective of whether the actual materials or performance actions are explicitly queer (though we’ll look at that possibility too). Additional points of departure for investigation will include how the audience builds a theory while watching a dance, what constitutes dance-events in each artist’s work, how events are framed; identification of consonance and dissonance; and queer excess, ambiguity, failure and futurity.

What to expect:
Directed improvisation; solo and group compositional exercises; discussion in large and small groups; optional readings.

For MELT-related questions, please email melt@movementresearch.org.