GPS/Global Practice Sharing minisymposium:
WHOSE DANCE IS MY DANCE?
COMPARING CAPACITIES FOR BUILDING COMMUNITY
This five-hour minisymposium is open to both contemporary and street/urban dancemakers, researchers, teachers, practitioners, students and anyone interested in the roots and potentials of today's dance forms. Featuring researchers and makers from USA Black dance and the Central and Eastern European dance and art communities, it explores the terms of community as a way to understand dance. Appropriation, history and practice become terms for understanding futures of dance as a gathering notion for people in resistance and in collaboration. The minisymposium will be held in English, and will emphasize collective thinking, listening and sharing.
11:00 | Introduction with co-hosts Maja Hriešik and Eva Priečková
11:15 | thomas f. defrantz: Communities of Relation
This talk by the well-known writer, director and professor of dance and performance studies at Northwestern University (Chicago) explores how dance practices gather people, and create the capacities of community. Considering how dance trains people to resist as well as how to collaborate, the talk will emphasize how dance forms have operated historically as levers of appreciation and concern that encourage growth and learning among people. Street dance and dance in education will be discussed as aspects of social formation that can encourage more just societies by emphasizing diversities of movement. “Relation” will be explained as a concept that encourages not-knowing and listening, rather than proving mastery as essential to ethical gestures. The talk will include a question and answer session.
12:15 | Robo Švarc: Post-colonial Central European Toxic Body
The colonial project, in most cases, consists of three main lines of influence: militant-economic, epistemic (imposing different knowledge/culture) and environmental violence. In the case of the former so-called “satellite states” of the former Soviet Union, it is of utmost importance today to examine how the legacy of Russian colonialism is intertwined with the slow violence of environmental damage. This talk by Slovak visual artist and curator Robo Švarc will provide a wider frame for exploring the interdependencies of historical legacy in the Central European region, current environmental crises and the absence of critical perspectives, to find representational, narrative and strategic keys to the (post)colonial toxic body that is my body. The talk will include a question and answer session.
13:00 | Lunch Break
14:00 | Whose Dance Is My Dance? afternoon sharing circle
In this cca two-hour sharing circle, all are invited to share and listen, describing the histories of the dances that we perform, as best we can. The circle will help us ‘fill in the gaps’ in dance histories, by telling each other what we know and also what we wonder. We will also create routes for future knowledge, by recognizing the information missing in our shared understandings of the dances that we do. The session will build upon the residencies in Slovakia and the Czech Republic of defrantz and dancemaker Ogemdi Ude, the experience of Bazaar Festival guest artists (from CZ, SK, SRB, H, MK…), and on the morning session presenters and symposium hosts Robo Švarc, Maja Hriešik and Eva Priečková.
The symposium will be held in English.
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Speakers’ and moderators’ bios
thomas f. defrantz, Professor at Northwestern University, directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a humanities and creative research lab and National Performance Network partner. Believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and is founding director of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Faculty and teaching at the University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; SNDO; Juilliard; New Waves Institute; P.A.R.T.S.; Movement Research; Bennington College; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Duke, the University of Nice. defrantz contributed the concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture in 2016. (slippage.org)
Maja Hriešik is an Ex-Yugoslavia-born, Slovakia-based maker, currently working in the wider field of dramaturgy, oscillating between art and activism, theory and practice. She has worked as an editor of a dance magazine, curated an international theatre festival, hosted a program on public space and activism on Slovak public radio and was one of founding members of the Slovak dancers' platform PLAST. As a freelance production dramaturg she has been collaborating with Slovak and Czech choreographers of different generations for over a decade. She published a book of essays entitled On Corporeal Dramaturgies in Contemporary Dance (2013) and is a lecturer at the Dance Faculty in Bratislava. She co-curated the European research project Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance (alongside Katalin Trencsényi, Guy Cools, Anne-Marije Van Den Bersselaar and Alexis Vassiliou) and collaborates with numerous independent art organisations as well as academic institutions as a mentor and coach for dance dramaturgy. She believes in human and other than human connections, collaboration as a strategy for survival, and considers intersections, contamination and dialogue primary resources in times of constant crisis.
Eva Priečková is an interdependent dance artist and facilitator of the dance education program Soft Core. She received her Master's degree from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. As Eva Priečková/False Move she organizes workshops, lectures and events that combine embodied movement experience with critical thinking about the body and relationships. She is interested in dance in various groups, ecosomatics, rituals of mourning and celebration, collective learning and re- learning, and dance outside the dance floor. Eva facilitates movement classes for different groups of people: social workers, the Roma minority and the elders. She is interested in the potentiality of dance education towards social justice, interpersonal responsibility and emancipation from the unconscious repetition of normative behaviour. For her, dance is an act of the impossibility of taming bodies and minds, of curiously noticing the world around us, of imagining, of awe or sensitive listening, and of everything that cannot be expressed in words. She is currently a PhD student at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) in Brno.
Robo Švarc is a visual artist, curator, author, chef, and translator from German. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2008-2014). From 2009 to 2017, he worked as an art assistant at the Kochkunst workshop of the German artist and chef Arpad Dobriban. Since 2013, he has been implementing the Lecture Art project, which connects cultural, political, gastronomic and environmental themes through lectures, seminars, workshops, gastro-events, festivals and more. In 2021, he curated the year-long multidisciplinary festival Beuys Will Be Beuys for the Goethe Institute in Bratislava. In 2021, his book, Non Exit, and a translation of the book The Congo Tribunal by Milo Rau were published. He is currently finalizing the translation of the book The Art of Assembly. Political Theatre Today by Florian Malzacher. In the 2024/25 academic year, he led the seminar “Art in the Anthropocene” at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. He is a co-founder of the civic association Hopelessness and Despair, which has been dedicated to utopian-realist projects in ecology and art since 2023.
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College and University of the Arts. She is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient. She has been a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence, 2024-2025 Leslie Lohman Artist Fellow, 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book, Watch Me, in a collection edited by thomas f. defrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
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Credits
Concept: thomas f. defrantz, Maja Hriešik, Ewan McLaren, Eva Priečková, Lucia Šimášková
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Support
GPS/Global Practice Sharing program, Movement Research New York, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Vize tance, PLAST Slovakia, rezi.dance v lese.
This project is supported by the GPS/Global Practice Sharing Program of Movement Research with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding as part of the GPS 10th Anniversary Season.