Symposium: 19 April 2022 - 2 to 6 pm
Doctoral Seminar: 20 and 21 April 2022
Venue: OPEK (Vaartkom 4, 3000 Leuven, Belgium)
Keynote speakers: Prof. Jane Gallop (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Prof. Carrie Sandahl (University of Illinois at Chicago), Sonja Jokiniemi (performance artist), Prof. Robert McRuer (George Washington University)
Cultural Studies (KU Leuven), NeuroEpigenEthics (U Antwerp), and STUK House for Dance, Image & Sound have the pleasure to invite you to Differing bodyminds: Choreographing New Pathways, a hybrid symposium that brings together speakers from different theoretical fields with dance scholars, practitioners and an interested audience to think about issues that are situated at the border between dance and dis/ability. Dance is traditionally associated with notions of fitness and ability. The trained body of the dancer is muscular yet supple, perfectly malleable, always ready to move. In recent years, however, choreographers have been increasingly questioning this conventional bodily regime, working with dancers that do not conform to the norms of “able-bodiedness” or age and taking the specificity of these dancers as a generative matrix for the exploration of new movement vocabularies. In so doing, these choreographers not only carve out new pathways in the field of dance but also disturb the conventional scripts that are entrenched in our cultural framework and that prescribe how bodies and minds are supposed to function and behave. The symposium will set up a dialogue between dance studies and insights produced by disability studies, CRIP theory, and queer theory. It will explore the potential of these ‘differing bodyminds’ to rethink notions of corporeality, ability, skill, and virtuosity in relation to dance.
The symposium will be live-streamed. Participation, both live and online, is free of charge, but registration for the live event is required.
Doctoral seminar
The Symposium is followed by a Doctoral Seminar on Crip Theory in the Arts and Humanities, co-organised by Antwerp University, KU Leuven, and Ghent University.
More info and registration here.