Congratulations to CDTPS PhD Candidate Yizhou Zhang on receiving the Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowship and Massey College Junior Fellowship. Yizhou describes the research she has been conducting, which these awards will be supporting:
In year 2024-25, my doctoral research currently entitled “Gestural Revolutions: Body, Movement, and Knowledge in Modernist Theatre” will be supported by the Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowship and the Massey College Junior Fellowship. I plan to present one of my chapters at the Northrop Frye Centre in the form of a lecture/seminar and engage my project in the interdisciplinary dialogues in the two scholarly communities.
My dissertation explores how modernist theatre practices make sense of “gesture”—the organization of the body into an operational sequence by means of a technologically and/or culturally derived “syntax.” I place this inquiry at the intersections of the histories of modernist avant-garde theatre, the scientific studies of movement, and the intellectual discourse of kinaesthetic knowledge. My interest in performing “gesture” is motivated by the concern with locating agency in the body’s slippage between an objectifiable instrument and an original point of action and perception.
My case studies include Antonin Artaud’s extreme physicality, Anna “Asja” Lacis’ improvisations, Bertolt Brecht’s Gestus, and the Bauhaus rhythmic movements. With the help of the CDTPS Research Grant and the Lise-Lone Marker Fellowship, I just returned from a research trip to Germany, where I visited the Brecht Archive in Berlin and the Bauhaus Museums in Dessau and Weimar.