Award-winning Dance Scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild opens lecture series
Princeton Arts Fellow and faculty member Jaamil Olawale Kosoko curates Reclamations! Lectures in Black Feminist Performance, and welcomes Brenda Dixon Gottschild, award-winning dance scholar, on Monday, October 2 at 7:30 p.m. This lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Roberts Dance Studio in Princeton University’s new Lewis Arts complex.
Award-winning artist-scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Photo courtesy the artist.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); and The Black Dancing Body-A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner of the 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication). A freelance writer, consultant, performer, lecturer and former consultant for Dance Magazine, she is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University.
The lecture series is part of a fall course taught by Kosoko and cross-listed in dance, visual arts and African American studies, “An Introduction to the Radical Imagination.” Using an interdisciplinary visual and performance studies approach to explore various sites of contemporary art practices, the course provides students an introduction to radical performance practices through which artists consider the gendered and racialized body that circulates in the public domain, both onstage and off.
Photo by Erik Carter
Kosoko is a Nigerian-American curator, poet, and performance artist from Detroit, Michigan. He is a 2017 Jerome artist-in-residence with Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 Association of Performing Arts Presenters Leadership Fellow, a 2015 American Express Leadership Fellow, a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow as part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and an inaugural graduating member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University. He has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts and The Watermill Center, among others. Kosoko is a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist and a recipient of a 2016 U.S. Artists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. His newest performance work #negrophobia received a 2016 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award nomination and is currently touring throughout Europe. As a 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, Kosoko is in-residence at Princeton, teaching, researching and continuing to develop new work.
Presented by Princeton’s Program in Dance, the series is cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Committee on Race and the Arts. Reclamations! Lectures in Black Feminist Performance continues in the Roberts Dance Studio with lectures by artists Ebony Noelle Golden on Monday, October 23, and Autumn Knight on Monday, November 6, both at 7:30 p.m.
