#multipcultural

What follows is a few examples of the ways I engaged with multiple cultural perspectives throughout my Div II.

I examined race and class throughout Div II, especially in how it relates to the dance world and my dance practices. The piece I worked on as a part of Deb Goffe’s repertory work in fall 2019 also speaks to engaging on a personal level with these politics. During this time I thought a lot about how I can support Black space in my own dance and dances.

During the class Critical Moves in the fall of 2019 I did a lot of engaging with multiple perspectives in the dance world. A lot of the discussions we had in class focused on various makers in the field who were using dance as a form of protest. We had only just begun exploring this rich topic when the semester was over, but it was a practice that I plan to carry through my Div III as well as the rest of my life. Watching dance is such a wonderful way to engage in difference because it humanizes us when we have been taught to other people who aren’t like us. Writing about dance and using dance to understand protest, resistance, and struggle was a huge part of my Div II that I again, hope to carry forward throughout the rest of my life.

I tried to engage race class and power in science as well, through my own research.  In conversations with my lab mates we discussed how STEM can be inaccessible to marginalized groups. We examined our own tendencies towards self doubt and how that can be a conditioned response. At the ASCB/EMBO conference, my lab partner Helen and I attended different workshops and discussion sessions centering POC in STEM as well as queer folks in STEM. We also attended a session on the importance of title IX coordination in grad school. These talks were easy to critique because they centered a very overtly competitive version of science-- one that at Hampshire there is just no room for. I would argue that if competition is the main structure at work, then equity is never going to be a reality. But they got the conversations started for us.

A text that stood out to me in this research is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which chronologies the story of a Black woman whose cells were stolen from her in the name of science. Because of their mutation, her cancer cells are useful in lab research, and HeLa cells are very common in the college and university level lab. None of her family has been compensated for her contributions to biology research, or even gotten profit from this book or the HBO movie made about her life.

House Pioneer Project for House/Hip Hop

Recontextualizing Love: The Storytelling of Sexuality and Politics in Karmen Gei

from West African Dance

Fighting for Reparations: The History of Racist Police Violence in Chicago

from Politics of Reparations 

As a participant in the Fall 19 Dance Repertory Ensemble course, Daisy Maass was a vital contributor to the group’s collaborative process. She engaged deeply and conscientiously with assigned texts, group discussions, movement explorations, and choreographic process. Early on, Daisy emerged as a vocal presence in ways that reflected her time spent with the texts, and her evolving understanding of how those texts related to the dynamics of the group and the work as it unfolded. As a mover in the process, Daisy developed phrase work that epitomized her balance between bold and inside-out gestures that stir visually and viscerally.

Along the way, our work together as a group proved to be far larger in scale than one semester could hold. Each member of the group was challenged to move through and with big questions about personal identities, while giving balanced attention to conceptual frameworks, social dynamics, aesthetic considerations, and skillful command of emerging movement language(s). As the group has prepared to bring the work to performance, Daisy, too, has had to grapple with this collision between the varying positions, perspectives, and experiences among the ensemble, particularly as they relate to the ways different bodies might be read on stage. Not all of those dynamics were evident to her throughout the semester, but as the group continues to work through the piece and its implications, Daisy has emerged as a conscientious ally of her POC collaborators by giving voice to the ways privilege contributes to the dynamics at play within the group and the piece itself, and illuminating blind spots around those privileges when necessary. While each member of the group would have benefited from earlier and more frequent written reflection, the final writing assignment of the semester provided an important space for this level of processing, and Daisy made good use of that tool. Her reflection astutely traced compositional choices to their implications for the culminating work. As she asks in her reflection, “How can we use the piece to really put into practice the breaking down of invisible boundaries as we philosophize?” It is clear that the process as a whole catalyzed powerful learning that can be best understood through the embodied repetition performance contexts uniquely provide. As we move into and beyond the Winter Dance Concert (February 2020), Daisy is already demonstrating tremendous growth as a conveyor of meaning, togetherness and criticality through performance. It is my hope that she is able to leverage the lessons gleaned from this experience through her own choreographic experiments, and in her performance, art-making and community-building efforts more broadly.

LQE Week 3 from Critical Moves

LQE Week 7 from Critical Moves

Performance reflection from Intermediate Modern Dance