Readings

Session #2 - December 9, 2025

From December's moderator, Maggie Bridger:

I have chosen a slate of readings and media from across a few different spaces and times that might help us think/talk/move through the role of dance, performance, and the bodymind in resistance and world building practices. Some address dance/performance explicitly, some come from organizers who do not address dance at all. I am wary of engaging with dance as inherently or unproblematically oriented toward protest or resistance, but am interested instead in what we as dance artists, scholars, supporters, etc might offer this moment (and have offered in other moments of instability). Feel free to engage with what feels most meaningful to you!

Materials:

• "Prefigurative Politics and Radically Accessible Performance Spaces" by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) from Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice - 2 pages

• "ILLEGIBLE Representations, Collaborative Protests" by Anthony Blacksher (he/him) and grace shinhae jun (she/her) -  15 pages

• "Choreographies of Protest" by Susan Leigh Foster (she/her) - 18 pages

• Ep 10 of the Love in a F*cked Up World Podcast with Dean Spade (he/him) feat. Kelly Hayes (she/her) - 56 minutes 15 seconds (content note: this episode speaks to ICE activity in Chicago and activist response, especially in the Roger's Park neighborhood.)

Session #1 - October 7, 2025

From this month's moderators, Lizzie Leopold & Jenna Pollack:

We've put together a reading list to think through CRISIS, but we have also purposefully chosen these readings to avoid a choreographic aestheticization of crisis (so this list may feel oddly tangential to dance upon first read).  We feel that these four short essays will help us contextualize moving bodies through an understanding of philanthropy (Wilbur), a solutioning already in action (Kim), a critique of crisis in its assumed relationship to historical timelines (Roitman), and finally a wacky futuristic fictional take on what arts & culture after this crisis might look like (Davis).  We will bring us back to dance in conversation and through a related movement exercise led by Julia Rhoads and Joe Bowie. Read any or all of the suggested essays!  

Readings (PDFs below):

• Sarah Wilbur's Conditions Apply: On Arts Philanthropy’s Apparent Crisis

• Angie Kim's essay "Financing a Diverse Future Through Community Ownership" 

• Introduction from Janet Roitman's Anti-Crisis 

• Prologue from Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy by Ben Davis

Readings from the 2024-2025 Season

Session #1 - October 22, 2024

Bellow, Juliet and Nell Andrew. "Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe." In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren. Routledge, 2015.

Session #2 - December 3, 2024

Getsy, David J. "Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction." In Queer Abstraction, exh. cat., edited by Jared Ledesma. Des Moines Art Center, 2019.

Session #3 - March 4, 2025

Gutierrez, Miguel. "Does Abstraction Belong to White People?" BOMB, November 7, 2018. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2018/11/07/miguel-gutierrez-1/.

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2018/11/07/miguel-gutierrez-1/

Session #4 - April 8, 2025

Edwards, Adrienne. "Blackness in Abstraction." Art In America (January 2015): 62-69.

Session #5 - May 27, 2025

Readings from 2022-2023 season

Session #1 - October 3, 2023

Adeyemi, Kemi. “The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1, 2019): 545–67. 

Session #2 - November 14, 2023

Jackson, Naomi M. “Educating Dancers with Dignity, Respect, and Care .” Chapter. In Dance and Ethics: Moving Towards a More Humane Culture, 57–91. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Session #3 - February 6, 2024

Osterweis, Ariel. "The muse of virtuosity: Desmond Richardson, race, and choreographic falsetto." Dance Research Journal 45.3 (2013): 53-74.

Session #4 - April 2, 2024

Kraut, Anthea. “The Dance-In and the Re/Production of White Corporeality.” The International Journal of Screendance 10 (2019): 15-51. https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v10i0.6514.

Session #5 - May 21, 2024

Sedgman, Kirsty. On the Reasonable Audience. Springer International Publishing, 2018. Chapters 1, 3 & 5.

Readings from 2022-2023 season

Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies by Ananya Chatterjea

Selected Chapters:

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Introduction

• Chapter 4: Germaine Acogny: Convective Heat and Ground Shift in Contemporary African Dance

• Chapter 8: Lemi Ponifasio, Camille Brown, Prumsodon Ok, Alice Sheppard: Constellatory Heat and Light on Alterity (only pages 246-254 on the work of Alice Sheppard)

Session #2  - December 13, 2022 - 

Funding Bodies by Sarah Wilbur 

Selected Excerpts:

• Preface 

• Introduction: Institutions Motivate Movement

• Chapter 3: Disinvesting in Dance: The NEA’s Neoliberal Turn (1997-2016)

• Afterword: Does the NEA Need Saving? Endowment and Collective Repair

Additional Reading:

• NEA 2022 Grant Announcement-Dance. This document lists NEA grant winners in dance for the first cycle of the 2022 fiscal year. 

• NEA 1966 Dance Grants. This document lists NEA's first grant winners in dance.

The entire book is open access and can be found here: https://www.weslpress.org/9780819580528/funding-bodies/

Check out the viewings for our December meeting.

Session #3  - February 28, 2023 (Date changed!)

Eco Soma by Petra Kuppers 

Selected Chapters:

• Introducing Eco Soma (12 pages)

• Chapter 3: Un/Bounding: Writing Water Worlds (49 pages)

• Chapter 4: Crip Time, Rhythms, and Slow Rays: Speculative Embodiment (43 pages)

Check out the viewings for our February meeting.

Session #4 - April 18, 2023

Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop by Imani Kai Johnson

Selected Chapters:

Introduction: Dark Matter, Breaking Cyphers

Chapter 1: Dark Matter and Diaspora: Cyphers in an Africanist Context

Chapter 4: Dancing Global Hip Hop: Negotiating Difference and Traditions in Cyphers

Session #5 - June 20, 2023

Selections from What A Body Can Do and Blue Sky Body by Ben Spatz. 

What A Body Can Do:

Introduction: What Can A Body Do? (21 pages) 

Chapter 5: Embodied Research in the University (33 pages)

Blue Sky Body: 

Thresholds (46 pages)

Notes for Decolonizing Embodiment (14 pages)