The Performance as Public Practice Program’s Fridays @2 Series presents a lecture by Dr. Susan Foster, UCLA Department of World Arts and Culture
Guest Moderator: Dr. Clare Croft
April 9 @ 2pm
Winship Drama Building (WIN) 2.112

Dr. Susan Foster is one of the most critical figures in the field of dance history and dance studies. For Fridays @ 2, she will present a lecture that examines Jérôme Bel’s Pichet Klunchun et Moi (2004) in relation to its representation of gender and, even more, the gendered division of labor that it embodies in order to discern what she sees as serious obstacles to intercultural collaboration. Gender provides an analytic framework for categorizing action throughout the performance that reveals the underpinnings of the euphoria produced by the performance’s display of cross-cultural conversation and understanding. She argues that Pichet Klunchun et Moi performs the felicitous heterosexual marriage of two cultures whose histories of privilege, wealth, and access to global circulation of products and ideas have been markedly different. It also reaffirms and reinvigorates hierarchies of civilization implemented in Europe’s colonization of the world. Although the association between the feminine and the Others and the ways in which the two are used to mutually marginalize one another have been demonstrated innumerable times, it is important to re-examine their association in the context of the recent explosion of intercultural collaborations in the arts.

Choreographer, dancer, writer, Susan Foster began presenting concerts of her own work in 1977. Since that time she has created several solo concerts which she has toured in the United States, Canada and Europe. She is the author of Reading Dancing (University of California Press, 1986), Choreography and Narrative (Indiana University Press, 1996) and Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). She is also editor of Choreographing History (Indiana, 1995) and Corporealities (Routledge, 1996). Ms. Foster’s work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment of Humanities, and the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations. Ph.D., History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A., Dance, University of California, Los Angeles; B.A. Anthropology, Swarthmore College.

Please also remember to attend the symposium on Deborah Hay, Thursday, April 8, at the Blanton Museum. Panelists will include Tere O’Connor (choreographer/dancer/teacher), Karen Schaffman (choreographer/dance scholar/ teacher), Christopher House (Choreographer/dancer/artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre), Bill Bissell (Director, Dance Advance, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage), Gabriel Smeets (Artistic director of the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Netherlands), Danielle Goldman (Scholar/teacher), Selma Odom (Historian/teacher), Ann Daly (Scholar, Author), and Nina Martin (Choreographer, Dancer, Scholar). Foster will deliver the Keynote Address. Open to the public and free of charge. See this link for schedule http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/cwgs/events/13532