#thomas defrantz

[makedathomasinstitute]

“Afrofuturist Remains: A Speculative Rendering of Social Dance Futures Pt.1” w/Thomas DeFrantz. Open to public

TODAY, Tuesday, 28 July from 2pm to 3:30pm at University of Trinidad & Tobago/Academy of Performing Arts, 3rd Fl. Dance Studio. 

This talk has two impossible objects. the first is actually a process: african american social dance. as process, this object of social dance shimmers and disappears in its very emergence; it is comprised of a sharing of time and energy, musicality and relationship.  an object with no real remnant and no particular place, but an approach to expression made manifest by motion.  the process of black social dance travels, but its contents change even as it comes into being. the second impossible object of this paper is an afrofuture black corporeality: an expansive phenomenological proposition that could allow for black people to be both visually and culturally present even as we are no longer politically maligned for being so. black people travel globally, with and without their social dances, but never without the tangle of racialized presumptions, assumptions, notorieties, and shames that accompany black presence in the contemporary moment and its past.  an impossible future black corporeality might be one that moves outside or beyond these tethering political alignments, even as ethnic and social connections could be encouraged and celebrated.  the object of a progressive afrofuture corporeality becomes impossible because it will never be here, it will always be in the future. it is also a seemingly impossible object because its terms - an unmarked blackness - stagger the imagination of our visually-oriented world, bound by grossly uneven flows of power.

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.

[leftofblack]

Remembering Geoffrey Holder, Renaissance Man

by Thomas F. DeFrantz | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

The term “renaissance man” truly applies to few; Geoffrey Holder (1930-2014), who passed away earlier this week after a long illness, numbers among those.  Holder had extensive success as an actor in films and stage, as a recording celebrity, costume designer, painter, director, dancer, and choreographer.

[makedathomasinstitute]

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]

[afutureancient]

Deconstructing the "Dougie": Thomas DeFrantz on the Importance of Black Social Dance

Duke University Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, author of Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture, discusses the importance of Black Social Dance like "The Dougie" and "The Charleston (Cake Walk)".

He is one if the scholars I cite in my thesis.