What Can A Body Do?: Practice Informed Pedagogies – New Learnings, Co-learnings and Unlearnings
When and Where
Description
Join us online for the first lecture of the series, What Can A Body Do? This lecture will be given by guest speaker Professor Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, about "Practice Informed Pedagogies — New Learnings, Co-learnings and Unlearnings."
About the Speaker
The first speaker in the series is Prof. Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, a faculty at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her specialization is in Critical Dance Studies, Visual Anthropology & Practice as research (PaR). She is a dancer/choreographer trained at the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre, Kolkata. Her current work is on changing landscapes of dance in India, human-trafficking and survival processes for survivors, and women dancers and / in their autobiographies. Urmimala taught Performance as Research at the University of Warwick, as a Visiting Faculty in the MA program in International Performance Research (MAIPR).
Her current publications include, Dancing Modernity: Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations, Palgrave (March 2022), Alice Boner Across Geographies and Arts, Alice Boner Series 3, Rietberg Museum, Zurich (2021), “Towards a Pedagogic Analysis of Dance and Movement Therapy” in The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance, (2021) and a chapter “Being Rama: Playing a God in the Changing Times” was written as a part of a project “Crisis of Democracy” (2018 -2019) funded by the Global Humanities Institute’s Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is now published in Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, edited by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha, 2020.
About the Lecture Series
Addressing what theatre and performance studies scholars have identified as the “practice-turn,” Ben Spatz centers the body in the methodological approach he has termed embodied practice. “[E]mbodied practice,” writes Spatz, “is structured by knowledge in the form of technique, which is made up of countless specific answers to the question, What can a body do?” He continues, defining embodied practice more specifically, “Technique is knowledge that structures practice” (Spatz 2015, 1; emphasis in original). This four-part speaker series engages embodied practice and its methodological cousins practice-based research and practice-led research through its invitation to foundational artist-scholars who approach the relationship between knowledge and practice through a variety of disciplinary, theoretical, and cultural fields to speak about their own practice and pedagogy.
To RSVP, contact debleena.tripathi@mail.utoronto.ca.