TRANSMISSIONS AND TRACES: RENDERING DANCE - “There Might Be Others” at the Dance Studies Association Conference

“With this conference, we seek to address where dance scholarship sits in the broader arena of dance transmission, with considerations of how dance might be tracked, or how it might be untraceable.” —DSA                  

I was excited to bring the workshop There Might be Others: Staging Negotiation to the DSA Conference 2017 at The Ohio State University. There Might Be Others is a system of collective composition that examines the role of presence, performer agency and group decision-making to create diverse communities, propose a model for collective activism and produce ethical performance. In the workshop, participants learned a selection of movement modules, from games to gestural phrases, and developed an understanding of the structuring rules of the community such as: perform every module, share leadership, if there is chaos hierarchy will emerge, collect to survive, act generously when frustrated; and create several short performances.