CDTPS Colloquium #4: New Transmissions of Dance

You are invited to the fourth event of this year’s Colloquia Series, where the Institute for Dance Studies will be sponsoring paper presentations by three of its University of Toronto PhD student members! Founded in 2016, the Institute for Dance Studies (IDS) is a research community hosted within the Centre. Through meetings, events, practice-based-research and resource sharing, IDS is a platform of support for scholars and students whose research is dance and movement focused. IDS advocates for the value of dance research beyond the scope of performance intended for the stage, acknowledging its potential for insight into society, culture, politics, health, and personal wellness. It is an interdisciplinary community with members from numerous departments and units. IDS Founder and CDTPS Faculty Dr. Seika Boye will be in attendance at this event to introduce IDS and to provide support for the facilitation of discussion. 
 
Troubling the Site/Sight of Dance: Reimagining the Dancing Body through Disability Studies
Jose Miguel Esteban
“Defend this as a dance film.” This was a response I received after a screening of Panalangin seeks us…, a dance film that attempted to explore access practices of audio description as choreographic and aesthetic inspiration. This presentation explores how such an utterance embodies an encounter with what disability studies scholar Rod Michalko (2008) suggests as the trouble of disability, and what I further suggest as a creative form of trouble that forces us to confront our limited and limiting perceptions of the dancing body.

Increased Demands: The Case of Springboard Danse Montreal
Martin Austin
Every summer, hundreds of international dancers travel to Canada to attend Springboard Danse Montreal. This yearly intensive allows young professionals to perform with, and get exposure to, major global dance companies. This paper presentation proposes that current practices of professionalization in concert dance like Springboard increasingly subject dancers to physical risk and financial precarity in tandem with broader strains imposed by globalization and neoliberalism.

Choreographing the Blockchain
Ilana Khanin
In 2018, two MIT students from the Viral Communications Lab created a Dance Dance Revolution-style mat that uses dancing energy to mine cryptocurrency. Distinguishing themselves from dance-as-art-object NFT endeavors, the dance mat points to a deeper connection between dance practice and blockchain use. This unexpected alignment between the dance and crypto spheres, I argue, raises the possibility of understanding blockchain as a choreographic project.