ADSA CONFERENCE 2021

PERFORMERS, MAKERS, METHODOLOGIES

CRAFTING CONDITIONS FOR DECENTRING SCHOLARSHIP AND PEDAGOGY IN DRAMA, THEATRE, PERFORMANCE STUDIES AND DANCE

Dance Research Australia Postgraduate Forum 2021 Program

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Session 1, Friday 3rd December

NZ-3.30pm | VIC/NSW/TAS-1.30pm | SA-1pm
QLD-12.30pm | NT-12pm | WA-10.30am

Chair: Dr Jo Pollitt

Rina Corpus – Kristin Jackson’s Life of Dance and the Migrant Body

This article is an account of Filipina-American choreographer Kristin Jackson’s dance history and selected repertoire. Jackson one of the few Filipina dance artists based in the US who articulates her bi-cultural identity, and has created and performed a sustained body of works in both America and the Philippines, but whose aesthetics and history have yet to receive attention in dance studies and scholarship. My practice runs parallel with my longtime interest in her works since I did my Masters thesis on Filipino women choreographers, later published as a book, which included her works. I bring to the fore Jackson’s history and dance education in the light of being a migrant body from the Philippine postcolony, framing her dance career as migratory in nature, therefore embodying the liminal, ambulant diasporic experience, articulated in light of cultural research by Marie Alonzo-Snyder, Martin Manalansan and Fenella Cannel. I then locate Jackson in the general context of women’s autobiography in dance which coincided with a general trend in this thematic mode in American dance of that time, using Ann Cooper Albright’s research. I cull important snippets from various reviews of her choreography to give a general overview of the quality of her movement and choreographic aesthetic and impact. This essay further articulates aspects of her dance and cultural history together with her movement quality characterized by meditative qualities and their multicultural roots.

Rina Angela Corpus is a movement artist, dance scholar and poet coming from a lifelong interest in the arts, spirituality and sacred narratives in culture. Born in Manila and now based in Melbourne, she integrates her long-time practice of Qigong and Raja yoga meditation with somatic and dance practices, bringing their meditative and poetic resonances into her movement expression. She studied and performed with the Quezon City Ballet, trained in Limon dance in New York, Nihonbuyo in Kyoto, and Qigong in Manila and Australia; published two books in dance, “Defiant Daughters Dancing” and “Dance and Other Slippages” (University of the Philippines Press), and widely written essays on culture and dance. Currently she is on leave as an Assistant Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, as she pursues a PhD Dance at the University of Melbourne.

Ioannis Sidiropoulos – Sound, Motion, and the Brain: how sounds affect the creation of movements within an improvised performance

The interdisciplinary practice-as-research project examines the effects of auditory perception on movement improvisation, and how this informs the creative process of an experimental performance. It hypothesises that there can be a measurable data-based relationship between heard sound(s), brain activity, and movement response(s). The central questions are how sound affects the brain during the creation of improvised movements and how these sounds influence the performers’ movement choices (actors and dancers). This research combines contemporary dance and physical theatre improvisation with cognitive neuroscience, exploring how responding to sound stimuli is expressed through embodiment and brain activity. Data will be gathered through individual movement improvisation from 10 performers based on recorded music and individual fMRI scanning while listening, imagining, and watching movement improvisation in specific tasks. The gathered data will be compared and correlated, forming data sets to develop an experimental performance.

Ioannis Sidiropoulos is an actor, dancer, artistic creator/director, drama and academic teacher, writer, and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne on the Melbourne Research Scholarship and the A.G Leventis Foundation Scholarship. His interdisciplinary research combines performing arts and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on how sounds and music affect the creation of movements within an improvised performance. He studied Acting in Higher Drama School in Athens, Greece, graduating with excellent and he earned his Master of Art in Physical Acting and Performance with distinction from the University of Kent in the UK. Ioannis taught drama and physical theatre in secondary education in Greece and the UK and his own experiential dance-theatre improvisation workshops. Since 2011 he is actively working in the performing arts sector as an actor, dancer, filmmaker, and artistic creator in Greece, England, Scotland, the USA and Australia and participating in performance and screendance festivals internationally. In June 2021, Ioannis received two Emerging Scholar Awards from the The Arts in Society and New Directions in the Humanities Research Networks.

Emma Fishwick – Slow Choreographies: Addressing everyday sexisms through creative interventions

Slow Choreographies is a research project that utilises choreographic practice and slow theory to develop creative methods that address everyday gendered inequalities. Part of a larger ARC Discovery Research project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities, this PhD research contributes non-traditional research outputs to assist in strategising alternative interventions for everyday sexisms. Guiding this study is the understanding of everyday sexisms as micro-aggressions and inequities that occur in everyday interactions, often banal, slippery, and hard to pin down. Feminist theories of space, art as pedagogy and slowness, frame the practice-led methodology that builds on my existing choreographic practice. When referring to slow, the research does not focus on the temporal qualities of slowness, rather it looks to the way in which staying with an idea actively raises consciousness and can crack open the relational structures of power and entangled logics that hold them. Choreography as an embodied and relational practice underpins the multidisciplinary creative responses and assists in handling everyday sexisms, which are experienced as both stemming from and projected onto the body. The creative body of work, Slow Choreographies, accompanying the exegesis makes visible the laborious, intersectional, and accumulative effects of everyday sexisms on the individual within the contemporary academic landscape. The relational and embodied nature of choreographic practice will assist in speaking to the slipperiness of everyday sexisms, which within the academy are met with fast fixes and imperceptible institutional change.

Emma Fishwick is a choreographer and artist who lives and works on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, Western Australia. Emma’s practice often questions whether dance can achieve the often-complex connections between the human and non-human, working across multiple mediums/practices. Some of these mediums are movement, photographic image, film, scenography, and scholarship. Emma is currently a PhD Candidate at Edith Cowan University, working with feminist spatial, art as pedagogy and gender theories, with a focus on art as a consciousness-raising tool. Emma’s PhD is part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities. Emma has worked extensively across Australia and abroad, is a member of the STRUT Dance Board, a lecturer and supervisor at WAAPA and is a mentor for artists with a disability. Her recent choreographic works include Slow Burn, Together (2021 Perth Arts Festival), Dance, Quiet Riot (2018) and microLandscapes (2016).