Talk Title: Grounding Practice: Vodou’s Corporeal Technologies in Haitian Dance Pedagogy
This is the first part of a two-part program. At 6:30pm Dr. Chapman will teach a movement workshop.
Bio: As an interdisciplinary dancer-scholar, Chapman’s research and performance work in critical dance studies moves through a nexus of African diaspora theory, performance studies, ethnography, queer/gender studies, and Caribbean thought. Her teaching mirrors her scholarship as she engages these multiple modes in the classroom and beyond. She teached courses that blur the boundaries between the studio and the seminar room, and in all of her work, dance makes space to explore the relationship between theory and practice.
Her first book centers on the labor of five contemporary Haitian dance artists who work in both Haiti and in the diasporas of New York City and Boston. She examines the ways in which dance, as fostered by these Haitian artists, makes and remakes “Haiti” in ways that are not possible without collective practice, and she traces how the teaching and choreographic practices of these artists foster alternative political imaginations.
As a dance-maker, Chapman works in site-specific collaboration with local artists to excavate, activate, and reimagine suppressed histories. She has facilitated collaborative performance projects in Port-au-Prince and Jeremie, Haiti (with Yonel Charles, Jean-Sebastien Duvilaire, and Ann Mazzocca), as an artist in residence at the Power Plant Gallery in Durham, NC (with Aya Shabu), and in residence at Tulane University’s A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans, LA (with Tè Glise Collective).