Black Aesthetics in Contemporary Dance

Supported by the Macgeorge Bequest and hosted by VCA Dance

In this performance-lecture, guest artist-academic Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz takes a multi-dimensional approach to black aesthetics in dance. Alternating between moving and speaking he asks: How can aesthetic theory be engaged in relation to African American dance practice? What sorts of aesthetic imperatives surround African American dance and how does black performance make sense of these imperatives? Who names the quality of performance, or who determines that a performance may be accurately recognized as “black”? More than this, how can African American dance participate on its own terms in a discourse of “beauty?”

Building upon research into African American concert dance, DeFrantz will draw on case-studies of three choreographers, Donald Byrd (b. 1949), Ulysses Dove (1947- 1996), and Abdel Salaam (b. 1949) to discuss and move-with these questions. DeFrantz’s project seeks to explore the recognition points of “beauty” that African American audiences attend to in dance performance in order to expand on the notion of what may be perceived as “beauty,” as well as the logic that determines who may name that quality. Arguably, contemporary dance studies has ignored the function of “beauty” as a potent aesthetic paradigm. The concept seems at once extremely unstable - what are the terms for recognizing “beauty?”- and monolithic, without significant nuance. More than this, “beauty”’s philosophical lineage has ignored dance, all the while positing universal values from which African American identity and subjectivity have also been excluded.

Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz visit to VCA Dance is supported by a Macgeorge Fellowship 2024.

About the residency:
VCA Dance is delighted to announce that Thomas F. DeFrantz will be in residence as a Macgeorge Fellow from 28th October – 2nd December. DeFrantz is recognised internationally as a performing arts scholar, dance artist and transformational leader in the arts and humanities. Through his value-based approach to education, he engages the creative spirit for collective good and is renowned internationally for his scholarship on technology, black dance histories and improvisation. During his residency as a Macgeorge Fellow DeFrantz will, alongside his public lecture, be meeting with VCA Academics and Graduate Researchers and engaging with the Melbourne Street Dance Community.

About Thomas DeFrantz

Thomas F. DeFrantz is a Professor in Performance Studies and Theatre at Northwestern University, USA. He is the director of SLIPPAGE: Where Black Studies & Artistic Research Forge New Possibilities, a performance and technology lab. DeFrantz 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. They convene the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in embodied writing. Creative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017. They have published widely including the Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Recent teaching includes University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; SNDO; Juilliard; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Northwestern University; University of Nice. DeFrantz chaired the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016. During his residency as a Macgeorge Fellow with VCA Dance in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, DeFrantz will be meeting with Dance Staff, Students and Graduate Researchers and engaging with the Melbourne Street Dance Community through Dancehousing.

https://www.slippage.org

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