Events

This workshop is organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS); with support from the NUS Humanities and Social Sciences Seed Fund – Dancing Ecologies in the Asia-Pacific.

In the Asia-Pacific, the relation humans have with their land- and seascape has traditionally been core to their existence, social identity and sense of belonging, and dance—as a form of embodied storytelling—has traditionally been one of the main mediums of expression and maintenance of this relation. Across history, a long series of events—colonization, evangelization, urbanization, rise of the tourist industry, programs for the protection and valorization of tangible and intangible heritages, acceleration of climate change, natural disasters, migrations and displacements—has come to complicate and often challenge this modality of relating to the land- and seascape. In this workshop, we discuss how dance practices evolved across time reflecting, absorbing, and resisting these changes, but we also examine the role dance often has in dealing with suffering and traumas related to events that undermined the physical or cultural survival of a community or the sense of belonging.

Welcoming approaches that draw from anthropology, performance studies, critical dance studies, literatures, media studies, migration and gender studies, and a diversity of research methods, including decolonized ethnography and practice as method, the workshop wants to be an opportunity to reflect on the connection between bodies and places and about the places, sounds, gestures, and memories that make us and that we carry with us when we move across time and space. In particular, we want to understand how dance embodies the space it signifies; which identities are expressed, negotiated, revendicated through dance; and how the communicative, transformative power of dance informs dance educators and choreographers in their attempt to engage dancers and audience “ecologically”.

By combining within the same conversation Asian and Oceanic sites, including mildly to highly urbanized Asian sites, animated by very complex and diversified ecologies and cosmologies, and sites in Oceania where green and water spaces are still predominant and the cosmologies more homogeneous, we hope to learn as much about local and regional ecologies, shared and unshared heritages, national and regional identities and how these are connected through dance.

WORKSHOP CONVENOR

Dr Céline CODEREY
Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid workshop has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.