Arts Pessimism and the Role of Dance in Time of Crisis

Join us for a conversation investigating the potential of choreographic thinking for an understanding of systems of relations. Dr. Susan Leigh Foster, Dr. André Lepecki, Dr. Erin Manning, Dr. Jens R. Giersdorf, Lilia Mestre, and Dr. Angélique Willkie will discuss how dance and choreography can function as mediating forces within social and political structures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Dr. Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is author of Reading Dancing, Choreographing Narrative, Dances that Describe Themselves, Choreographing Empathy, and, most recently, Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Three of her danced lectures can be found at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage website.

Dr. André Lepecki works and researches at the intersection of critical dance studies, curatorial practice, performance theory, contemporary dance and visual arts performance. Selected curatorial work includes Chief Curator of the festival IN TRANSIT (2008 and 2009 editions) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Co-curator of the archive Dance and Visual Arts since 1960s for the exhibition MOVE: choreographing you, Hayward Gallery (2010). Curator of the lecture series Points of Convergence: performance and visual arts (2014) and Off-Hinge Off Center: alternative histories of performance, for the Museum of Modern Art of Warsaw (2014 and 2015). Also for MoMA-Warsaw he curated the series Performance in the Museum (2015). He also curated the project “The Future of Disappearance” for Sydney Biennial 2016, and co-curated with Adrian Heathfield the symposium Afterlives of Performance, at FiAFF and MoMA 2015.

In 2008 he received the AICA Award for Best Performance as co-curator and director of the authorized re-doing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (commissioned by Haus der Kunst, Munich 2006; presented at Performa 07).

Selected lectures include Museo Reina Sofia, MoMA-NY, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio, MACBA, Para Site, Hong Kong, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, WIELS, The Gauss Seminars at Princeton University, Freie Universität, Berlin, Brown University, UC-Berkeley, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, École Superiore des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. In 2009 he was Resident Fellow at Institute Interweaving Performance Cultures at Freie Universität, Berlin. In 2015 he was Artistic Professor at Stockholm University of the Arts, where he helped develop the research profile area on Concept and Composition.

He is the editor of the anthologies Points of Convergence: alternative views on performance (MoMA-Warsaw and Chicago Univ. Press 2016, with Marta Dziewanska), Dance (Whitechapel, 2012), Planes of Composition: dance, theory and the global (Seagull press, 2009, with Jenn Joy), The Senses in Performance (Routledge 2007, with Sally Banes), and Of the Presence of the Body (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). His single authored books are Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (Routledge 2006), currently translated in 13 languages, and Singularities: dance in the age of performance (Routledge 2016).

Dr. Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming, minor compositions). Her artwork is textile-based and relationally-oriented, often participatory. She is interested in the detail of material complexity, in what reveals itself to perception sideways, in the quality of a textural engagement with life. Her work often plays synesthetically with touch, of recent in acknowledgement and experimentation with the ProTactile movement for DeafBlind culture and language. Tactile propositions include large-scale hangings produced with a diversity of tools including tufting, hooking, knotting, weaving. 3e is the main direction her current research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual (3ecologies.org). An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.

ABOUT THE MODERATORS:

Dr. Jens Richard Giersdorf is an international dance scholar whose research focuses on choreographies of politics in a global context as well as epistemological concerns in dance studies. He received a Magister Theater, Dance and Music Theater Studies from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside, USA. He taught at the University of Surrey, UK, Marymount Manhattan College, and the University of California, Riverside, both USA. His writing has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals as well as translated and anthologized internationally. Giersdorf is regularly invited by key national and international institutions to speak on his work. His monograph The Body of the People: East Germany Dance since 1945 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) is the first study on dance in East Germany, it was named “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2013 by Choice magazine. The German translation Volkseigene Körper: Ostdeutscher Tanz seit 1945 (transcript Verlag, 2014) was supported by the Swedish Lilian Karina Foundation. Giersdorf edited Choreographies of 21^st Century Wars (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory Series, Oxford University Press, 2016) in co-authorship with Gay Morris and the third edition of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2019) with Yutian Wong. In his professional affiliations, Giersdorf is a member of Dance Studies Association, where he also served as the Vice President for Publication and Research and the International Federation of Theater Research.

Lília Mestre (she, her) is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working in collaborative formats mainly in the fields of contemporary dance and choreography. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social-political reflection. She has been working on the concept of ‘artificial friendship’ which has been the source for the creation of methodological structures (scores) for exchange and collaboration in artistic research settings, which have been documented in various publications. She was artistic coordinator of a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels and is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary Dance and Co-director of the Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC) within the MILIEUX Institute for Arts Culture and Technology at Concordia University. Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She was granted the The Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award 2023 for her research on expanded choreography “Through Materialities, Movement and Description”.

A multidisciplinary artist, Angélique Willkie began her dance training after completing a Master’s degree in Economics at McGill University. A graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, she subsequently pursued a career in Europe where, over 25 years, she performed with dance companies and independent projects throughout Europe, most notably Alain Platel/Les Ballets C. de la B., Jan Lauwers/Needcompany, Sidi LarbiCherkaoui, Helena Waldmann and as a singer with the Belgian world-music group Zap Mama, bands Arno, dEUS, 7Dub, DAAU, Ez3kiel, and Zita Swoon Group, with jazz vocalist David Linx and contemporary composers Walter Hus, Kaat De Windt and Fabrizio Cassol.

Performer, singer, dramaturge and pedagogue, Angélique has been among the more sought-after contemporary technique teachers on the European professional circuit, teaching companies, schools and festivals including ImpulsTanz (Vienna), Henny Jurriens Stichting(Amsterdam), SEAD (Salzburg), Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez (Brussels),Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique (Montreal) among others.

Since resettling in Montreal in 2014, Angélique has continued to be active in Montreal’s professional community as teacher, creator and dramaturge. Her current research interests have three main axes: approaches to interdisciplinary artistic creation (i.e. that sits“between” disciplinary boundaries); European circus aesthetics and dramaturgy; and the notion of a personal dramaturgy, inspired by the trajectories of performer Josephine Baker and French transgender circus artist Phia Ménard. An underlying interest in her work remains the use of the voice as a creative tool and performance instrument.

🗓 September  25, 2025
🕒 2-4 PM
📍4TH SPACE

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