- January 20, 2006: 11:00am - 12:00pm
- Contact: Travis Richardson
- Location: 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building
Friday lunch series
January 30, 2006
Noon-1:00 p.m., 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building, the Dado and Maria Banatao Conference Room
Screening Bodies, Dancing Technologies: An Overview of Live and Media Performances
Lisa Wymore (Dance Artist/Choreographer and Assistant Professor of Dance at UC Berkeley) and Katherine Mezur (Dance Scholar/Choreographer and Assistant Professor of Dance and Intermedia at Mills College) will present a talk on the interaction of technology and live bodies in contemporary dance making. The presentation will include a brief overview of dance and technology performances and experiments such as the random generation of choreographic steps via computer programs, motion capture, the machine as a dancer, and the interactivity of projections and performers in both "real" and "virtual" spaces.
The presentation raises questions concerning the disappearance of the "human" in technological encounters, the "humanizing" of codes and visual "matter," and the confusion and ambiguity of human-like and live kinesthetic communication. The presentation will include visual examples of dance/media performances, installation art, and video from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Also addressed in the presentation will be Tele-Immersion Choreography. Wynore, Mezur, and Ruzena Bajcsy, (Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley) are collaborating on a long-term project exploring Tele-Immersion technology, 3-D presence/co-presence and corporeal and code interactivity within a live and media based performance. The research is both performative and mediated and questions ethical, philosophical, and practical applications of this technology within the arts and society.
Biography
Lisa Wymore began her graduate study at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she was awarded a Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship, an Outstanding Achievement Award, and a Moe Family Award for her creativity. After graduating with an M.F.A. in Dance in 1998, she moved to Chicago and began her career as dancer, choreographer, and teacher. She has danced with Mordine and Company Dance Theatre and Hedwig Dances as well as numerous independent choreographers. She has been a guest dancer for the Joe Goode Performance Group, in the Chicago version of Mythic Montana and a guest dancer for the Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert in her Chicago version of Odyssey. For her choreography, Lisa has been twice awarded Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and has been awarded several Community Arts Assistant Program Grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Her work has been seen in numerous festivals, including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art Summer Solstice Celebration, Dance Chicago, and the Performing Arts Chicago PAC/edge Festival. In January 2004, she traveled to Vietnam working on a project entitled Artistic Voices Across Cultures in Collaboration. The dance company that she Co-Directs has one numerous awards including "Best Interdisciplinary Performance" and "Best Use of Technology" at Chicago's PAC/Edge Festival 2004. The company was nominated for "Sexiest Show" at the 2005 Dublin Fringe Festival and has just been nominated for two 2006 Isadora Duncan awards (San Francisco Dance Awards) for "Best Choreography" and "Best Design". Wymore is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and is finishing her Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis Certification this coming year.
Biography
Katherine Mezur is an Assistant Professor in the Dance Department at Mills College. Most recently she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and a Beatrice Bain Scholar (Gender Studies), University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Dance, emphasis on Asian Performance, from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, an MA in Dance (Mills College) and a BA in Film and Photography (Hampshire College). She is a feminist scholar, director, and choreographer whose research focuses on gender studies, corporeality and media, and transnational performance in the Asia Pacific region. She is author of, Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Female-likeness on the Kabuki Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), a history of the kabuki female gender performance and its contemporary practice, aesthetics, and politics. She is currently working on the manuscript, Cute Mutant Girls: Remapping the Female Body in Contemporary Japanese Performance Art, that focuses on Japanese women choreographers/directors, performers, and visual artists who are radically transforming paradigms of the "little girl" through extreme visceral and virtual articulations in performance and media works. Current performance work includes Skin a video performance installation, "In the Flesh: cold burn, code, and choreography," a work-in-progress that is a tele-immersion dance performance, and "Animation: Fantastic Choreography" a study based on Japanese animation characters. Other projects on "performance as research" focus on collaborative transnational choreography, installation, and performance works in the Asia Pacific arena. She has held positions at Georgetown University, McGill University, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis. Her research has been supported by a Mellon fellowship at the California Institute of the Arts, a Fulbright research grant, a Social Science Research Council grant, and an NEH grant.
Last Updated: September 14, 2006 - 10:54am