Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Dance at Duke University, and President of the Society of Dance History Scholars, an international organization that advances the field of dance studies through research, publication, performance, and outreach to audiences across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. He is also the director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, winner of the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the Errol Hill Award presented by the American Society for Theater Research) and Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture(Oxford University Press, 2004, winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for Outstanding Publication in Dance). A director and writer, his creative works include Queer Theory! An Academic Travestycommissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts. In 2005 he worked with DonnaFaye Burchfield to design the American Dance Festival/Hollins University MFA Program in dance. He has taught at NYU, Stanford, Hampshire College, MIT, and Yale; has presented his research by invitation in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, and Sweden; and performed in Botswana, France, India, Ireland, and South Africa. He recently composed music for a new ballet past-carry-forward created for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and performed inTheory-ography 4.5: we[still]queerhere, a work he curated for SLIPPAGE. Current research imperatives include explorations of black social dance, and the development of live-processing interfaces for performance.
27.11.13:
DancePolitics: Race, Identity, and Global Performance Race and Identity Politics continue to inspire and divide artists and audiences As artists circulate work created in local contexts, where race and identity convey particular ideologies, nuanced details of relationship collapse. How do audiences in local communities come to appreciate touring dances that conceive of race and identity differently than the artists who perform for them? What happens when political ideologies of race and identity collide from artist to audience.
28.11.13:
Afrofuturist Remains: Black Dance and Mobilization African American dance influences contemporary and relational performance in ever-widening arcs. How is it that dances of a small portion of the United States population have a consistently huge impact on global circulations of dance theater? This presentation considers the recovery of African American social dances by contemporary stage artists, and the distance between the generators and inheritors of these dance traditions.