Contemporary Performance and Experimental Dance: Staging a Recognizable Traditional with Thomas F. DeFrantz and Joan Burroughs on Monday, 21 July 2014 at Hotel Florita. Experimental choreography reaches into the spaces of 21st-century expression that value individual artists and her concerns, while Africanist aesthetics value art that recognizes the activities of the group and its well-being. How do contemporary artists perform for both the ancestors and the future? What does it mean to create live art performances that spring from an Africanist aesthetic landscape and speak to a future-leaning conception of 21st-century life? How do we make experiences in dance that might be simultaneously recognizable and unprecedented? This discussion/workshop will offer examples of contemporary work that speaks within and without Africanist aesthetics. RESOURCES Born a Hoosier, Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Dance at Duke University and Chair of the department of African and African American Studies. He also acts as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars, an international organization that advances the field of dance studies through research, publication, performance, and outreach to audiences across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and the director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, winner of the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the Errol Hill Award presented by the American Society for Theater Research) and Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture(Oxford University Press, 2004, winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for Outstanding Publication in Dance). His most recent publication is an anthology, Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2014). A director and writer, his creative works include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts, and Monk’s Mood: A Performance Meditation on the Life and Music of Thelonious Monk. He has taught at NYU, Stanford, Hampshire College, MIT, and Yale; has presented his research by invitation in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, and Sweden; and performed in Botswana, France, India, Ireland, and South Africa. In 2012 working with Takiyah Nur Amin and Makeda Thomas among others, he established the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, which hosted the conference “Dancing the African Diaspora: Theories of Black Performance” in February, 2014 at Duke University. Current research imperatives include explorations of black social dance, and the development of live-processing interfaces for performance. [email protected]