Monday, February 12, 2018

Stanford Colloquium on Dance Studies

Join us for a trip down to Stanford to hear Dr. Harmony Bench present on her work Wednesday, March 7. Details below!


Wednesday, January 3, 2018

DSWG + Fresh Festival

DSWG is happy again to be partnering with the Fresh Festival for an intimate conversation on creating and dancing during times of crisis. Please join us and help spread the word!

Thursday, January 18, 7:30-9:30pm
Red Poppy Art House
Creating from/in times of crisis
Panel discussion with Jadelynn Stahl, Julia Havard, and Juan Manuel Aldape

From environmental disasters to sexual trauma to political upheaval, this past year has encompassed all of this and more. In this discussion we ask how does one create from the tumult or ruins of environmental, political, and personal turmoil? What resources are needed? How do we work together to build networks of support and accountability both on and offstage, inside and outside the studio? How do we, as individuals invested in the creative potential and resiliency of the body, look forward collectively to imagine and actively create a better, more equitable future?

Jadelynn Stahl is a radical, interdisciplinary performance artist and organizer based in Oakland, California. Fusing elements of durational art, video, ritual and burlesque, her work seeks to centralize and complicate socially prevalent narratives concerning systemic cultures of violence, in particular gender-based violence and forced assimilation. Stahl offers her body as a site of artistic investigation, exploring somatic and psychological expression in relation to legacies of trauma as well as cultural, racial and sexual identities.

As a community organizer, Stahl collaborates with both local and national collectives and organizations to incite dialogues that contribute to the movement to end sexual assault, including FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture (Baltimore). She is the founder and lead coordinator of DISCLOSE, a queer, Oakland-based collective of artists and educators committed to facilitating arts-based community engagement in the eradication of sexual violence. Stahl is the recipient of the 2017 East Bay Fund for Artists Award. Her currently developing performance work Choreographies of Disclosure, a long-form collaboration between Bay Area artists and survivors of sexual assault, will be shown in a month-long exhibition at Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland in the Fall of 2018.

Juan Manuel Aldape Munoz is a formerly undocumented, working-class choreographer born in rural Mexico. As practitioner and researcher, his work focuses on movement, migration and mapping discourses related to undocumented bodies and choreographic processes. He is the curator and coordinator of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers. He co-founded A PerFarmance Project, site-specific collaborations between farmers and performers researching the concept of food security from rural and urban perspectives. He is a PHD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley (USA). He holds an MA in International Performance Research from the University of Warwick (UK), as well as a BFA in Modern Dance and BA in Anthropology from the University of Utah (USA).

Julia Havard is a queer white cis glitter femme who writes about sex, race, disability, queerness and dance in education, activism, and performance. She is a PhD student at University of California Berkeley in Theater Dance and Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation explores histories and practices of queer burlesque as an activist resource. She practices burlesque as JuJu Sparkle, and most recently has been performing as Carrot Christ, the new new chancellor of UC Berkeley. She co-facilitates a working group at UCB, Radical Queer Decolonial Pedagogies of Composition. In 2017 she co-published the Anti-Milo Digital Toolkit, a resource for shutting down white supremacist alt-right figures such as Milo Yiannapoulis in academic spaces and presented on this work for the Berkeley Center for New Media forum on "Digital Dissent." In 2016 she co-coordinated a "Survivors' Symposium" at UCB to create survivor-centered space for survivors of sexual violence. Publication of her work regarding #WhyIStayed as a survivor-centered activist project on Twitter is forthcoming in the anthology #Identity.