Courses Taught
George Washington University
Understanding Dance: Introduction to Dance Studies
Trends in Performance Art
Dance Composition II
Intermediate/Advanced Modern and Postmodern Dance
Independent Study
Honors Thesis
Santa Clara University
Performing Justice or Just Performance?
Histories of Black Dance in the US
Dance History, Advanced Writing CORE Course
Stanford University
Dancing Theories of Race
Intersectionality and the Politics of Ballet
Independent Study: Edward Said, Culture, and Empire
* Above courses reflect Instructor of Record
Select Descriptions
Dancing Theories of Race
What can choreography and movement practice lend a comparative understanding of race studies? Pairing critical theory in race studies with dance performance, this course moves through ten units to scaffold a nuanced orientation toward race and dance that moves beyond questions of representation toward agency, animation, and action. Each week centers one key dance performance alongside one formative text in comparative race studies to allow for close-analysis and critical interpretation, featuring choreographers such as Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown, Lenora Lee, and Ralph Lemon alongside theorists like Frantz Fanon, Cedric Robinson, Edward Said, Patricia Collins, and Jose Muñoz. Through interdisciplinary modes of knowing, we will pair text and movement through the dancing body to (re)consider the social, historical, and political formations of race and its presentation on and off stage.
Community-Engaged Performance Methods
When Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat challenges us to ‘create dangerously,’ how do we respond? Under what guiding principles—political, ethical, social, and cultural—do we create, for what end, and with whom? This interdisciplinary methods course invites students to invest in the potential of performance as both product and method for community-engaged scholarship and research. Together as citizen-artists we will 1) survey methods and practices in community-engaged research, rooted in an anti- colonial model of engagement, 2) discover notable artists and activists who exemplify this potential, and 3) culminate in student proposals for a semester-length project (such as honors theses). Although grounded in theater, dance, and performance studies, this course welcomes all interested students, including those interested in the performance of justice, broadly construed.
Bodies of Law: Embodiment and Performance in Legal Theory
Scholarship in critical legal studies—not least the recently bourgeoned law and literature movement— remains predominately bound to textual analysis, omissive of an alternative diligence toward the political potential of the body as a site of embodied knowledge, intellectual practice, and creative discipline. Within legal frames, the body has not frequently been offered agency as a sentient actor. How would the relationship between law and culture, between the letter of the law and its instantiation, change if we framed the body otherwise, as itself holding cultural memory and legal form? That is to say, if we allowed interdisciplinary methods of cultural anthropology, ethnography, affect studies, performance studies, and critical dance studies to intervene in the law and humanities initiatives of the past few decades?
We enter this new terrain together to think collectively on the potential to expand the legal humanities toward methods of the body: kinesthetic awareness, gestural repertoire, and ephemeral power. In calling for a somatic intelligence, we mean not to reinforce hierarchies of knowing in which emotional and embodied intelligence are classed secondary to ‘true intelligence.’ Against such racial and colonial tropes of knowledge production, this class instead thinks toward a more comprehensive view of legal theory that holds multiple modalities at once. This upper-division course supplements the Law, Politics, and Economics track in Anthropology, but is open to all students interested in the legal humanities.
Trends in Performance Art
Arguably the most politically charged genre of art, contemporary performance art moves between theory and practice, social movements and the self, political actions and aesthetic trends. The field itself is vast and contended, with originary threads in Dadaism, Futurism, Fluxus, and Bauhaus tradition, and often conflated with related practices of happenings, endurance performance, body art, and process art. If obscured, the genre continues to influence popular artists like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and A$AP Rocky. Motivated by the genres continued potential to activate change, this course surveys a range of 21st century performance artist as entry to critical elements of performance arts, including: duration, site, publics, and the artist themselves as medium.
Students will move been connective concepts and creative processes as they learn to work in interdisciplinary spaces of art-making to activate awareness and affect change. Assignments will include both critical writing and artistic explorations based on scholarly texts and performance events; no prior experience required. Some featured artists include: Marina Abramović, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, William Pope.L, Rashaad Newsome, Amir Nizar Zuabi, Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Ai Weiwei, and more.
Performing Justice or Just Performance?
Having considered the stage as a place of society and spectacle in THTR 1A, THTR 2A asks: can performance enact justice, or does is it only ever just performance? In this seminar, we follow interdisciplinary methods and transnational ideas of justice as rehearsed within the performing arts to consider the dense space of theory and practice as generative for (re)imagining justice beyond legal studies, political science, and philosophy. As we move through themes of police brutality and racial vulnerability, indigenous sovereignty and sanctuary states, sexual violence and gender activism, we continue to return to performance to generate new orientations toward violence and vulnerability, intimacy and intimidation, retaliation and reconciliation, trauma and transformation. Together, we will encounter canonical names in new form: Shakespeare and Sophocles, Derrida and Foucault, alongside playwrights such as: Anna Deveare Smith, Ayad Akhtar, Beth Piatote, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison. Expansive in its reach, this class pushes students to reconsider how the law oozes into spaces of the humanities, lines of play, and theatrics of the courtroom that together create a potential to imagine justice otherwise—as creative, playful, aesthetic, possible.
Teaching Areas
Performance Studies; Dance Studies; Body and Composition | Law and Humanities; Social Theory; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Justice | Comparative Race Studies; Postcolonial Theory; Social and Cultural Activism | Ethnographic Writing and Methods; Social and Cultural Anthropology; Community-Engaged Research