Grad Research: INGZ Collective curator Natalie Zelt produces "Sampling," March 31 - April 2

Exciting news from one of our graduate students: Ph.D. student Natalie Zelt, a curator for the INGZ Collective, has curated a performance series entitled "Sampling," where artists Tameka Norris (aka Meka Jean), Brontez Purnell and The Younger Lovers, and Kenya (Robinson) CHEEKY LaSHAE adopt personae culled from tropes and representation of musicians- exposing pervasive norms, pressing the boundaries of everyday identity, and reflecting on the relations between personae play, embodiment and power.All are invited to attend, to participate, to engage!

Thursday, March 31

• 10-11:30 am: Tameka Norris Become Someone Else Workshop I (Location: GWB Multipurpose Room) Email info@ingzcollective.org to sign up.
• 5:30-6pm: Sampling Opening Reception (In Winship Building)
• 6-8pm: Screening of Free Jazz & Performance by Brontez Purnell and The Younger Lovers followed by a Movement Workshop open to the public (location: Lab Theatre)

Friday April 1, 2016

• 2-3:30pm: Tameka Norris Become Someone Else Workshop II (Location: WIN 1.148) Emailinfo@ingzcollective.org to sign up
• 4-4:30pm: CHEEKY LaSHAE gives a paper at New Directions in Anthropology Conference (Location CLA 1.302B)
• 5:30pm-7pm: Meka Jean "Ivy League Ratchet" Happy Hour Performance (Location GWB Multipurpose Room)
• 9pm-11pm: MONTH os SUNDAYS--CHEEKY LaSHAE Singes BLACK SABBATH with Meka Jean encore performance of "Ivy League Ratchet" and a opening act by The Younger Lovers (Location: Museum of Human Achievement)

Saturday April 2, 2016

• 11am-12pm: Brunch Talk with Tameka Norris, Brontez Purnell and The Younger Lovers and Kenya (Robinson) (Location: CLA 1.302D)

Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis's Original Comedy, "My Dinner With Bambi," to Premiere in Austin

Although our university won't be back in session for several days yet, we couldn't wait to post this exciting news about one of our faculty members. Dr. Randy Lewis, who we've featured in the past for his expansive work on topics from surveillance to media studies to public scholarship, has penned an original play that will premiere in Austin later this month. We asked Dr. Lewis for a few words about his new work, and how it relates to his broad interests in all that American Studies has to offer...

So a funny thing happened on the way to the lectern—I wrote a play, a dark comedy called My Dinner with Bambi (A Shocking Comedy) that is now in rehearsals under my direction. Is it funny? Outrageous? Insightful? You be the judge when it opens on January 22 at Austin’s FronteraFest.The main character is a force of nature called Bambi Krill. She’s a media celebrity extraordinaire, a powerful woman with hints of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Stephen Colbert, and Mephistopheles. The basic set-up is that she’s holding court with her two young acolytes, Sarah and Roger, one of whom is not yet converted to the dark side of big money punditry. Drinking heavily after a widely protested campus lecture, Bambi spars with her minions until an explosive encounter with Sarah’s parents brings deeper tensions to the surface. And no one—on the right or left—gets off unscathed. (I mean this quite literally: a real Taser is one of our central props).As anyone who knows me can deduce, Bambi is another version what I often talk about in the classroom. For instance, last fall I was working on Bambi while teaching undergrads how to make documentary theater out of Internet troll comments (talk about tragedy!). I love this overlap between my academic and creative work. For me, it all flows together—especially when I’m teaching courses with titles such as “The Politics of Creativity.” Bambi also has many literal connections to UT: we auditioned actors at night in a seminar room in Burdine, we ended up casting several alums and one faculty member, and we’re working with a consultant from UT’s Drama Department, which is something I really appreciate as a first-time director.We have an amazing cast and know that you’ll enjoy the show—especially if you have any connection to American Studies. After all, how many plays have jokes about Moby Dick, Thomas Kinkade, and turducken? (Not King Lear—I checked!). Even if you’re not part of the American Studies world, we hope you’ll come see Bambi in action starting January 22.

More information about the play can be found at its website and Facebook page, and tickets for all four performances are available here. We recommend you buy tickets in advance if you're interested in checking the show out - they'll sell out!

Five Questions with Rebecca Rossen

Today we're pleased to feature an interview with another one of our incredible affiliate faculty members, Dr. Rebecca Rossen, professor of dance history in the Department of Theatre & Dance and Performance as Public Practice. Dr. Rossen has just published her first book, Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford). We recently sat down with her to talk about her scholarly and artistic background, her new book, and her future research and teaching.What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your current research?Before I was a scholar I was a dancer and choreographer in Chicago. I did that for the decade after I graduated from college, my entire 20s. I went to graduate school to get a PhD, expecting to continue on making dance, but the experience ended up transforming me into a historian. I would say that as a scholar I'm a dance historian whose work focuses on identity, ethnicity, and gender representations in performance. Methodologically, I bring together my work as a dance historian with my experience as a performer. Those two threads are not only present in my research but are also present in the classes that I teach and how I teach them.What has been your favorite project to work on so far?As a scholar I've worked on one main project (with multiple side projects) for a really long time, which started as a dissertation--as many of our projects do--14 years ago. It was finally birthed as a book last spring. It's both my favorite project as well as something that I have sometimes referred to as "the beast" because it was the project. Dancing Jewish has been an extremely involving endeavor. The book looks at how American Jewish choreographers, working in modern and postmodern dance, represent their Jewishness. I show how, over a 75-year period, dance allowed American Jews to grapple with issues like identity, difference, assimilation, and pride.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?Dancing Jewish considers various themes that are repeated in dances over time, like nostalgic depictions of Eastern European Jews or biblical heroism as a response to World War II or Jewish humor and stock characters. Because the book focuses solely on Jewish-American performances, it's definitely an American Studies book. I'm interested in the next book in looking at representations of the Holocaust in performance, not focusing solely on American artists but including European and Israeli artists, and not just focusing on Jewish artists but also including non-Jewish artists who have responded to the Holocaust in interesting ways. The next project is a natural extension of the first one but takes a more global perspective and moves beyond considering just the work of Jewish artists.How do you see your work fitting into broader conversation in dance history or American Studies?Dancing Jewish is certainly an American Studies book, because when you are talking about Jewishness in America, you are talking about how a group of people balanced a very specific ethnic identity with their Americanness, which generally--especially in the earlier part of the century--was conceived as not-Jewish. There are some very interesting tensions that get worked out in these dances between Jewishness and Americanness and how choreographers are choreographically trying to balance these identities or converge them. It is ultimately a book about American identity with a specific lens looking at Jewish identity. But it is also a work of Dance Studies, so if you are interested in dance and performance, it's a book that considers how identities are performed physically. Because of that, and because of my background as an artist, I think one of the contributions it makes is its use of embodied scholarship. I spent a lot of time in the archive, I did dozens of interviews, and there is analysis of photographic and video evidence and live performance. But I also use embodied methodologies, which means that at points in my research, I had physical and creative dialogues with my subjects. For example, I asked two of my subjects to "make me a Jewish dance," and even though I didn't have any money and they didn't yet know me, they said okay. That process was a very interesting entre into my understanding of their work, because I didn't just learn about their products on stage, but I also learned something about their processes and what Jewishness meant to them.There are a number of ways in which my experience as a dancer/choreographer influences my research. Another example from the book is that I was a dancer in a piece called Breathe Normally. It's a very abstract piece; it was loosely about a family who has immigrated from the old country to the new country where they are very successful and lose touch with the past. The word Jewishness is certainly never mentioned in the performance even though there is text in the piece, but because I was in the room with those people as it was created, I am able to talk about how the piece is about assimilation. I would say that embodied scholarship is something that Dance Studies brings to the table and something that is not often found in American Studies or History scholarship. And there's consideration of gender in Dancing Jewish as well, because you can't really talk about ethnicity and stagings of ethnicity physically without talking about gender. So it's pretty interdisciplinary.What has inspired your research and teaching? What people, texts, things?There's a dance historian named Susan Manning who is my mentor and who wrote a book called Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion, which looks at American dance and the ways in which race informed what we call modern dace. Her work is very influential. So is the work of Sander Gilman, who looks at the Jewish body as a concept. More specifically, there are some really interesting theatre scholars who look at how Jewishness is represented in American theatre. Harley Erdman wrote a book called Staging the Jew which looks at ethnicity in American theater in the late 19th century and early 20th century, an era when a lot of Jews immigrated to the U.S. It's a very rich book. Another important work is by Henry Bial called Acting Jewish, which looks at representations of Jewish identity in popular American performance, specifically theatre and film in the mid-twentieth century. He has an idea called "double coding" that was really useful to me and considers how different audiences read and analyze a work differently. For example, a Jewish audience would get different messages from a performance than a non-Jewish audience. I found this useful in talking about works where other scholars or critics overlook Jewishness. Because I'm able to read the codes, I'm able to read Jewishness that's been assimilated out of a piece, abstracted away.Bonus Question. How would you define American Studies in one sentence?American Studies is an interdisciplinary inquiry into what it means to be an "American" that tries to understand how Americaness is represented and who gets to represent it and how.Rebecca Rossen (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is a dance historian, performance scholar, and choreographer whose research interests include modern and postmodern dance, stagings of identity in physical performance, and the relationship between research and practice. She teaches courses in dance history as well as undergraduate and graduate seminars that focus on identity in dance and interdisciplinary performance. Professor Rossen is a faculty affiliate in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and the American Studies Department.

Announcement: Performing Blackness Symposium Today!

The Department of Theatre and Dance’s Performance as Public Practice program and John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series will host a discussion today of Charles O. Anderson/dance theatre X’s TAR, with conversation about Black dance, producing Black art, and the role of art in generating social change. The symposium will take place in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre in the Winship Building on the UT campus from 1:30-5:00p.m.Keynote Speaker: Dr. Thomas Frantz, Professor of African and African American Studies/Dance/Theatre Studies, Duke UniversityFeatured Panelists:Ms. China Smith, Founder and Executive Artistic Director, Ballet Afrique, AustinDr. Omise’eke Tinsley, Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies, UT AustinDr. Michael Winship, Professor, Department of English, The University of AustinThe symposium is in conjunction with two public performances of dance theatre X’s TAR on April 12 and 13 at 8:00 p.m. in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre. Both performances are free and open to the public.Hope to see you there!