For 10/9/09 meeting with Mary Armentrout

dear all,

I very much look forward to seeing you this Friday (4 to 6 in Dwinelle Annex, room 126).  I just wanted to let you know some of my thoughts for the upcoming session.  Jessica Robinson, director of CounterPULSE, who is my main collaborator in producing the dance discourse project, has enthusiastically said she will be joining us for this session, which I think will be great.  We will be talking about the dance discourse project in general, in addition to spending some time with the topic of the upcoming ddp #7 – “dancing diaspora” and the larger festival “Performing Diaspora” at CounterPULSE that it is part of.

There are two topics that I think are of interest, and I am hoping we can have time to discuss both of them.  First, I am very interested in hashing out how things like the dance discourse project run into the theory-practice divide, and I think this group may have interesting opinions about that.  Second, I want to make sure we have time to talk about some of the issues inherent in the “dancing diaspora” idea, bringing us to issues around culturally specific dance and how it lives in the modern world, and perhaps even the particular identity of the bay area dance scene.

I keep returning to the Shannon Jackson reading on the theory-practice divide, and am glad we picked it as one of our two main articles for the year, so I plan to bring aspects of that reading into our discussion.  The Kraut reading I think nicely intersects some of the issues that will come up around dancing diaspora.  In the interests of further elaborating, messing up, and problematizing the working artist-theoretician divide, I am also offering you all these two selections from the CounterPULSE “Performing Diaspora” blogs.  All of the artists in the festival have been blogging about their work and process, and I find these two very strong and full of rich problems.

Prumsodun Ok talks about costuming and gender in classical Cambodian dance:
http://counterpulse.org/approaching-the-feminine-prumsodun-ok-for-performing-diaspora/

Sri Susilowati talks about innovation within traditional forms and the
“pigeon-holing” of ethnic dance:
http://counterpulse.org/traditional-dance-does-not-put-the-%E2%80%9Cno%E2%80%9D-into-innovation-with-apologies-to-the-shredded-wheat-commercial/

If you have a chance to look at these too, that would be great!  see you on Friday!

xx  Mary