20 Becoming Porous: Performing with(in) Climate Chaos
Description:
Arising from HowlRound’s 2018 convening “Theatre in the Age of Climate Change,” The Climate Commons for Theatre and Performance is an international, radically de-centered coalition of practitioners from diverse disciplines working at the intersections of performance and ecology.
In this working group, founding members of the Commons will endeavor to deepen and share methodologies for moving beyond the fear, shock, and grief which naturally accompany confrontations of the “long emergencies,” sudden catastrophes, and inequitably distributed impacts of climate change. Part activist challenge and part intellectual/aesthetic exercise, this working group seeks to re-center parody, satire, and celebration within performative interventions in and around the climate crisis on Planet Earth.
Through both generative and discursive sessions, this working group endeavors to reframe our view of climate change beyond the anthropocentrism which brought us to this global emergency in the first place—making room in our myriad practices for the wild, the hilarious, the naughty, and the more-than-human.
Format and Structure:
While climate issues in the arts are often placed in the category of an environmental 'topic', we are increasingly aware that climate intersects with all of the most urgent discussions around anti-oppression and social equity that our field has bravely faced historically. Resisting this pigeonholing, this working group affirms that theater and performance must be a leader in a necessary cultural shift toward acknowledging the intersectionality and entanglements inherent in issues of ecology and environmental justice.
The “Climate Lens Playbook,” a methodology designed by conveners Una Chaudhuri and others, which has inspired works presented across the world, will be a roadmap for the group’s creative time, and a springboard for recentering our individual and collective epistemologies around arts practice.
We are aware that representational challenges (time scales, climate phenomenology, and globalized socio-economic shifts) pose particular complexities in making coherent, relevant, and provocative narratives that aren’t just dressed-up science or sociology presentations. Armageddon is inevitably depressing, so how do we infuse stories about the end of life as we know it with humor, satire, optimism, and decolonized imaginings of bio-diverse futures while still keeping our eye on science and policy shifts?
The working group’s focus will allow participants to move into practice. Time will be structured for discussions, presentations of case studies of humor, satire, mockery, inversions of anthropocentrism and laughter, generation of writing and performance, and showings of what is created, with an excursion into a “green” space in Mexico City for at least one of the days.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
Conveners speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Conveners:
Una Chaudhuri (she/her) is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University. A pioneer in the field of “eco-theatre”—plays and performances that engage with the subjects of ecology and environment—as well as the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies, in 2014 she published books in both of these fields: Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (co-edited with Holly Hughes) and The Ecocide Project: Research Theatre and Climate Change (co-authored with Shonni Enelow). Her monograph, The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance, was published in 2017 by Routledge Press. Professor Chaudhuri participates in collaborative creative projects, including the multi-platform intervention entitled Dear Climate. She is a founding member of the artist collective CLIMATE LENS.
Elizabeth Doud (she/her) is a Miami-based artist with a background in creative writing and performance, and in depth experience as arts organizer and educator, with an emphasis on international cultural exchange and climate arts. She has worked extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean in the performing arts, and co-created Climakaze Miami with FUNDarte in 2015, an annual climate performance and dialogue platform. She lead the Performing Americas Program of the National Performance Network from 2007-2018, and holds a PhD in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. She was recently a visiting professor/practitioner at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights at the University of Texas in Austin, and received a 2018 Knight Foundation Challenge Grant to create eco-performance in South Florida.
Robert Duffley (he/him) is Editor and Assistant Dramaturg at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. As part of the A.R.T.’s “Act II” program, Robert designs and facilitates events which convene diverse publics in acts of transformative dialogue and imagination. He has developed new work with the A.R.T. (including works co-commissioned by the Harvard University Center for the Environment), LubDub Theatre Co, Organic Theatre, and the Moscow Art Theater. Writing includes pieces for Contemporary Theatre Review, HowlRound, The Theatre Times, and Six By Eight Press. He is an Affiliated Faculty Member at Emerson College’s Department of Performing Arts and a resident in the Orchard Project’s NYC Greenhouse.
Dr. Adilson Siqueira (he/him) currently works at the Department of Literature, Arts, and Culture (DELAC), Federal University of São João del-Rei where he teaches in the Theatre Course and in the Postgraduate Program in Performing Arts. He is also a professor and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Program in Arts, Urbanities, and Sustainability. Adilson does research in performing arts and its relation to Sustainability and Climatic Change, Performer Training and Theatre teaching. His current project is Ecopoéticas cênicas, performáticas e transdisciplinares.
Georgina H.L. Escobar (she/her) is a Ciudad Juárez native and New York-based playwright and theatre maker whose most notable work includes Then They Forgot About The Rest, (Brooklyn Generator 2018), Bi-(be) (Teatro Milagro Tour 2018), Penny Pinball Presents The Beacons (INTAR NewLab Workshop, Marfa Live Arts), Sweep (Aurora Theatre 2017), Death and the Tramp (Milagro 2016), Ash Tree (Duke City Repertory 2012), among others. She’s written and directed for and with Milagro, New York Children’s Theatre, the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, Clubbed Thumb Emerging Writers Group, and at Marfa Live Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, and the Fornés Writing Workshop. She’s a recipient of a Kennedy Center National Theatre for Young Audiences Award, and an Outstanding Service to Women on the Border Award for her production of VDAY Spotlight on the Women of Juarez. She is on the Advisory Committee for the Latinx Theatre Commons, and sits on the Board of Marfa Live Arts.
Participants:
- Alejandro Chellet
- Brontë Velez
- Eli Nixon
- Emma Morgan-Thorp
- Grisha Coleman
- Hallie Abelman
- Jacinta Yelland
- Julia Barbosa Landois
- Kathleen Schaag
- Katie Pearl
- Kiyo Gutiérrez
- Lawrence Bogad
- Mady Schutzman
- Marco Guagnelli
- Maria Firmino-Castillo
- Marina Guzzo
- Michele Minnick
- Paul Bonin-Rodriguez
- Rodrigo Malvar
- Sandra Valeria Navarro Magallón
- Sarah Kanouse
- Tanya Kalmanovitch
- Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal
19 Dissident Bodies: Activism Beyond the State
Description:
This workgroup explores collective practices, spaces, temporalities, and movements that surface as alternatives to global homogenization and the neoliberal project in particular.
From the experience of the groups that participants work with, this work group focuses on embodied practices that expose and counter the complicit role of the state in the spread of neoliberalism and/or creative practices that spark grassroots emancipatory social transformation. We question the idea of "the citizen," the unchecked universality of human rights, the State as the ultimate unifying force for social organizing, the fantasies of uprooted global thought, and the current meltdown of capitalism. Our bodies mark our dissent, our dissent marks our bodies.
We hope to reflect on revolutionary possibilities for the future, looking at examples of social practices that are working today throughout the hemisphere as glimpses of that "other world" that is possible to build.
Format and Structure:
The workgroup will be structured like a popular assembly or community meeting. Each participant will be expected to give a short presentation (which can be a verbal report or story, or formal power point) on their struggles and activities, with an eye to the following questions:
- How do grassroots interventions serve as examples to concretize and critique more elusive political and economic forces?
- How can communities activate their traditions and organizational structures to successfully engage or participate in symbolic battles?
- How can we think of performance through activism and activism through performance?
- How can performing activism activate popular repertoires of self-governance?
- How can community activism circumvent/overturn governmental corruption and intransigence?
Our goals involve building on our work in Encuentro 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2016 by expanding networks of social justice activists in the hemisphere, exchanging performative tactics deployed in our varied struggles, and identifying critical points of leverage that open opportunities for revolutionary change. Humor and noise are welcome.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
English; but we negotiate and use Spanish and Portuguese.
Conveners:
Peter Kulchyski is a professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He has been a member of the Hemi Council and co-director of the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas. His most recent book is called Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice: Begade Shuhtagotine and the Sahtu Treaty (UManitobaP 2018).
Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist, working in disrupting the overwhelmingly passive participation in the contemporary ‘cult of the techno-logic.’ Shaped by collective resistance to the colonial project throughout the Americas, Pilar focuses her practice on projects challenging complex state/corporate systems of control, domination, and death. She is presently touring her performance work the NO!!!BOT; giving talks on "The Extractocene;" and most recently published Idle No More: Grounding the Corrientes of Hemispheric Resistencia with Dr. Alex Wilson, and Situating the Web of the Necro-Techno Complex: The Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno. More info available at https://www.prabapilar.com/
Participants:
- Ana Beatriz Figueiredo Tavares
- Anne Bluethenthal
- Erika Bülle Hernández
- Gervais Marsh
- Joshua Truett
- Juan Suarez
- Lorena López
- Manuel Alejandro Parra Sepulveda
- Marcos Antônio Alexandre
- Nuria Carton de Grammont
- Paula Valentina Roa Dueñas
- Roberson de Sousa Nunes
- Rossella Matamoros
- Shannon Hughes
- Tatiana Navallo
- Timothy Maton
- Viviane Luiza da Silva
18 The Noise of the Borders
Description:
What does a border sound like? How do we listen to migration, displacement, and the periphery? How do our bodies absorb the absences, the pain, and also the exchanges, the translation processes, and the experiences that border encounters imply? How can we listen— through our own sonorities—to the stories of displacement and transformation that constitute us as migrant bodies?
Based on these questions, in this group we will explore different ways to listen to the noises of our body: we will shout, improvise and perform different listening exercises, in order to discuss the social situations that occur in border contexts.
It is important to say that when we speak of borders we do not necessarily speak of geographical limits, but also familial, ideological, political, or any other divisions that are incorporated into our being and sow cracks in our own sense of identity, at the same time as they generate new identities and allow us to recognize ourselves as complex beings.
The main premise of this work group is that there is a continuum between our own sonority and the sounds of a fragmented society; thus, by listening to our internal noises, we can unravel the multiple vibrations of our environment.
Format and Structure:
This working group will combine theoretical discussions on noise, resonance and border culture with different types of listening dynamics and sound improvisation.
More specifically, we will rely on diverse methodologies such as the listening protocols of the Ultrared collective, the deep listening exercises of Pauline Oliveros, and some listening exercises by Murray Schafer, among others, to enter into a collective experience centered on listening to the noise of our body and its relationship to social borders.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
Spanish and English.
Conveners:
Rossana Lara studied piano and musicology at UNAM’s Faculty of Music in México. Her doctoral research explores the formation of the experimental music and electronic art fields in Mexico, along with the discourses around sound and technology in these practices, based on anthropology and media history. Her research interests also include the study of 20th century concert music. Part of her work has been presented at forums such as the International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics, and Cybernetics in Baden-Baden, the International Congress on Musical Signification in Lithuania, the Noise in and as Music Symposium at the University of Huddersfield, the Mapping Sound and Urban Space in the Americas Symposium at Cornell University, and the International Music and Code Symposium /*Vivo*/, among others.
Jorge David García is a Mexican musicologist and composer, and a full-time professor at the Faculty of Music of the UNAM. His research topics include the epistemological dimension of listening, the relationship between music and politics, and the relationship between art, new technologies, and the social movements that derive from free software and the Internet. He is also an active composer, and as such, has collaborated in various theater, dance, and film projects. He is part of different groups of research and sound improvisation, among which stand out the Network of Studies on Sound and Listening, and the music collective Armstrong Liberado.
Participants:
- Bianca Scliar
- Coman Poon
- Jake Nussbaum
- José luis Romero
- Juan Aldape Munoz
- Luis Arturo García
- Martin de la Cruz Lopez-Moya
- Marusia Pola Mayorga
- Mauricio Barria
- Mitchell Oliver
- Paloma Martinez-Cruz
- Simone Luci Pereira
- Valeria Navarro Magallón
- Victoria Polti
17 Metafiesta: ‘La fiesta’ that talks about (and laughs at) itself
Description:
Since 2007, the work group “Game, Fiesta, and Power”, has participated in the “Encuentros” with workgroups and other initiatives. For the next “Encuentro”, dedicated to “The World Inside Out: Humor, Noise, and Performance” we are going to focus in the concept of ‘Metafiesta’, a way to articulate the festive experience with an ironic-theoretical reflection. The main focus of our workgroup proposal appeared after adopting some inspirational ideas proposed by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (From Ritual to Theatre, 1982), performance theorist and theater director Richard Schechner (The Future of Ritual, 1993, Environmental Theater, 1994), anthropologist Manuel Delgado (Fiesta and Mutiny, Fiesta and Public Space, 2004), Esherick & Wasserstrom (Acting out Democracy, 1990), the plays of Mapa Teatro (Los Santos Inocentes, 2011 y Los Incontados 2015), the performances of the colective El teatro de los Sentidos (El Hilo de Ariadna, 1990; La memoria del vino, 2015), The Performance Group (1967), Hans Thies Lehmann book Postdramatic Theater, and Allan Kaprow’s happenings; which integrated the elements of environment, constructed sections, time, space, and people, into a total art object. The practices of these writers have discovered what its interesting is not only the explicit intention of the actors/agents in relation with a certain institutional-political-societal-economic festive context, but also the reality which they create -as social clots or molecular masses- with their actions, participating, intervening in the course of events which happen first and foremost in the public space. And how this social action is related to aesthetics.
Fiesta is, with its happenings and theater, gestures and symbolic objects, scenography and landscape accidents, a grammar which allows to formulate a direct theater enactment, and a self-reflexive project, a politics of ecstasy, where the re-appropriation of a territory, the creation of a collective identity, and the illusion of a common-unity they merge together into a ritual stage allowing groups or individuals to affirm who they are, who they want to be or even nullify (cancel) their identity.
Format and Structure:
The workgroup proposal is both a workshop and a masterclass, we aim to inquire, and contribute to the festive happenings which surely will take place during the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro. By means of exploring and enacting liminal scenes-performances-intermissions-between acts, written by the conveners and the workgroup participants, we hope to produce a work of art embedded in the festive performance, cultural, and the landscape of the Encuentro event. A play of direct theater designed collaboratively with the morning work groups, later through the day be represented during the festive events of the Encuentro events, and finally discussed once they are finished, ideally during a collective “hangover” throughout the next morning. Our proposal speaks about itself, giving meaning, and significance to its occurrence while taking place. It will be an event where the audience is invited, even expected, to participate. An event of “supreme authenticity”, where people are involved with their environments, with the ritual scenographies, and perceptions are extended to their limits. Metafiesta is designed to be a theater of risk, spontaneity, exposure, and intensity, where the performance and scenario can transform itself, and still may conduce to unprecedented insights; even generating new symbols, and meanings which may be incorporated into subsequent performances.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
Spanish, English, German, Italian, and French.
Conveners:
Alex de las Heras is a conceptual artist, contemporary art and performance curator, and a PhD candidate in Human and Social Science at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he is working on a theoretical and artistic dissertation title “Metafiesta”—a device for the construction of future-oriented festive stages. Heras fell in love with social sciences, rituals, and festive “happenings” at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria, where he holds two Masters: one in Experimental Design, and the another in Media Culture and Art Theories. His practice is a combination between a common militancy of game and humor, the popular, and banal.
Paolo Vignolo is associate professor of history at the Universidad Nacional of Colombia, Bogotá. His fields of research and creation deal with public history, cultural heritage, and memory studies with a focus on live arts and performance. He holds a PhD in History at the EHESS of Paris, and in 2012-13 was selected as the Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University.
Camila Aschner-Restrepo is assistant professor of cultural studies at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. Her fields of research and creation deal with performance and memory, narratives and utopias, and dystopias across different media. She holds a PhD in interdisciplinary studies in Humanities and Social Sciences from Emory University, Atlanta and a certificate in artistic research from a.pass, Brussels.
Participants:
- Andres Jurado
- Angela Marciales
- Chris Ignacio
- Darling Lucas
- Futoshi Moromizato
- Jessamyn Lovell
- Joshua Truett
- Karim Raziel Gutiérrez Torres
- Luis Conde
- Márcia Chiamulera
- Rachel Bowditch
- Richard Aviles
- Tatiana Maria Damasceno
- Vanessa Ogbuehi
16 Work/Chop/Group: Risus et Panis, Urbis et Circenses
Description:
The normative perspective of urban space is directly linked to the maintenance of power: displacements for work and consumption, spaces domesticated and optimized by a functional urbanism for capital. In this context, the ideas of laughter—nervous, naughty, libertarian, scandalous—and noise, ranging from irony to sarcasm, are configured as possibly disruptive of the norm and can be understood as effective artistic and activist practices through direct contact with the citizens, in which strategies, tactics and techniques are negotiated to disrupt the orthodox use of space. The second edition of the work/chop/group (after the successful experience in Santiago in 2016) invites scholars, artists and/or activists interested in experimental urban practices that combine theory and practice to propose urban disruptions that affect the city through laughter—nervous, naughty, liberarian, scandalous—and noise, ranging from irony to sarcasm. As in the first edition, the observation and intervention activities will be cyclically experienced by the participants, so as to promote experience and reflection in the urban environment of Mexico City.
Format and Structure:
This group will be “chopped" into two different roles: observers and interveners. Each group will perform through the streets of Mexico City. The interveners are supposed to propose daily actions that disrupt the ordinary uses of a previously-chosen urban space, considering the possibilities of laughter and noise. After observing these actions, the observer group will generate an analysis that will inform their own practice as interveners (a re-action) the following day. Through this possibility of shifting roles each day, participants are asked to destabilize the distinction between performance theorists and practitioners and to engage with the urban environment and its multiple interaction possibilities.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
Co-conveners are native Portuguese speakers and proficient in English, Spanish, Portuñol, Spanglish and other cross-border languages. They also try hard to speak French.
Conveners:
Fabio Salvatti is a performer, theater director and Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, in the Program of Performing Arts. He was a 2015 Visiting Scholar of Performance Studies at NYU / Hemispheric Institute. Salvatti holds a PhD in Performing Arts from USP (Universidade de São Paulo, 2010) and an MA in Theater from UDESC (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, 2004). His research interests are focused on humor, activism and pedagogy. His research on radical performance pedagogies encompasses artistic and activist practices, without the possibility of disciplinary distinction into separate fields. Since 2016, he has coordinated Estúdio de Arte Rebelde (“Rebel Art Studio”), where he has developed performances in the intersection between art and activism.
Pedro Bennaton holds a BA and an MA in Theater from UDESC. He is a researcher, performer, director and author and a member of ERRO Grupo, a street theater group and art collective focused on urban interventions. He has directed and written several plays which have a place in Brazilian’s theater and urban art scene. He has performed in Brazil, South America, Europe and in the U.S.A. and has been awarded a series of national and state art prizes. Bennaton currently attends the third year of his doctorate program at UDESC, where he taught from 2009 to 2012 as an adjunct professor of Acting Techniques and Performance Studies. He has also taught workshops offered by ERRO in the urban space. His research dialogues with Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theater proposals and techniques and also with the Situacionist’s political and artistic possibilities.
Participants:
- Bertie Ferdman
- Catarina de Morais Gama
- Christopher Mendoza
- Geovanni Lima da Silva
- Jiordi Rosales
- Líria Morays
- Lúcia Helena Martins
- Mara Leal
- Piedad Lorena Guerrero Coka
- Rachel Brown
- Rebecca Pappas
14 Subjects Unbound/Unbordered: Arts, Migration, Resistance
Description:
While the US, Mexico, and Central America’s Northern Triangle are separated by geopolitical borders, they are linked by the migratory movements and flows of people, goods, and ideas. This has long been the case, and yet our contemporary moment is marked by increasingly violent and divisive political rhetoric, widespread precarity, and deadly migratory journeys. Drawing from different regions of the U.S., Mexico, the Northern Triangle, and beyond, this work group seeks to convene artists, activists, and scholars focused on creative, political, and intellectual practices of resistance and subversion that challenge and undermine the neocolonial systems and structures that enable these rhetorical, visual, and physical violences. In the face of such extreme brutality, we are interested in exploring practices that facilitate public dialogue and engagement with the current political and ecological landscapes through subversion and satirization, revealing and imagining new points of convergence, and encouraging alternative modes of visual and sensual perception and engagement. The work group will adopt a workshop approach to both artistic and scholarly materials through creative archive and bibliographic sharing as well as site-specific exploration. Artists, activists, and scholars engaging questions of resistance and social transformation through sound, visual practice, and performance and in relation to transnational migration and human rights are especially encouraged to apply.
Format and Structure:
Each session will be organized around three to four presentations of participants’ scholarly and creative work, followed by discussion. One or two sessions will also be spent exploring these themes and conversations in real time within the physical spaces of the city. Further details on the structure will be determined in tandem with the participant selection.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
English, Spanish, and Portuguese
Conveners:
Kaitlin M. Murphy is an assistant professor in Spanish and Portuguese and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. She is on the Executive Council of the New York University Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Murphy is also a committee member of the Hemispheric Studies Forum of the Modern Languages Association, a council member of the Visual Culture section of the Latin American Studies Association, and co-chair of the Memory and Trauma working group of the Memory Studies Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. Her book, Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics is forthcoming in Fall 2018.
Anita Huizar-Hernández is an assistant professor in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She is affiliated faculty in Latin American Studies, Mexican American Studies, and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature (Cultural Studies) from UCSD. Her book, Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West is forthcoming in Summer 2019.
Adela C. Licona is Associate Professor of English and Associate Chair of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Graduate Minor is affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies, Institute of the Environment, and Mexican American Studies. She is co-editor of Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (JHUP, 2009), author of Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY, 2012), and co-editor of Precarious Rhetorics (OSUP, forthcoming). Licona is Editor Emeritus of Feminist Formations, and serves on the advisory/editorial boards for QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Feminist Formations, the Primavera Foundation, and Tucson Youth Poetry Slam / Spoken Futures.
Kency Cornejo is Assistant Professor of Latin American Art at the University of New Mexico. She has published on Central American art in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Art and Documentation; FUSE Magazine; with chapters in Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, and Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010. Currently, she is completing her first book on twenty-five years of art and decoloniality in Central America. Kency holds a doctorate from Duke University. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright, Ford, and Andy Warhol Foundations.
Participants:
- Bernadine Marie Hernández
- Bonnie Cox
- Elaine Peña
- Francisco Galarte
- Joanna Sanchez-Avila
- Karen Secrist
- Paula Kahn
- Rodrigo Arenas-Carter
- Rosa Claudia Lora Krstulovic
- Shalon Webber-Heffernan
- Shannon Bell
- Szu-Han Ho
- Tavia La Follette
13 Racial Impersonation in the Americas
Description:
Racial impersonation is an act of occupation in which one takes literal and figurative possession of the other. It is an act of surrogation, a citational practice and the idiom through which racial sentiment is signified and expressed. This work group invites investigations of performances of racial parody across the Americas, including blackface, yellowface, redface, skin-bleaching etc, particularly in the context of humor and satire. We ask: what do parodic representations of blackness, indigeneity, Asianness and racial others tell us about race and racial formation in the Americas? How do such performances affirm and re-constitute stereotypes of social others? Why does racial impersonation persist as a site of laughter and humor across the Americas? How do racial others employ racial parody to engage with hegemonic representations of blackness, Asianness or indigeneity? How do colonial understandings of race persist through genealogies of racial impersonation? We welcome studies of racial impersonation in embodied practice, visual and popular culture including cartoons, art exhibits, festivals, film, theatre and performance art and a vast array of cultural phenomena.
Format and Structure:
Each work group participant will have 20 minutes to present a paper, followed by an active discussion of the paper with the rest of the participants. The last session of the work group will be a general discussion of themes and questions that arise during previous sessions.
Languages spoken/understood by conveners:
English and Spanish
Conveners:
Danielle Roper is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Romance Languages Department at the University of Chicago. She graduated with a PhD from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University in 2015 where she defended her dissertation Inca Drag Queens and Hemispheric Blackface: Contemporary Blackface and Drag performance from the Andes to Jamaica. She is currently writing a book entitled Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Multiculturalism in the Americas.
Cristel M. Jusino Díaz completed her PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She holds a Masters in Spanish from NYU in Madrid and a BA in Latin American Studies from the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Recinto de Río Piedras. Her dissertation, "Balance Prepóstumo: Queer Temporality and Latin American Literature, 1983-1993", focuses on questions of queer temporality in Latin American literature written during the HIV-AIDS crisis. She is the Assistant Director of Student Affairs at the Graduate School of Arts and Science at NYU.
Ricardo Gamboa is an award-winning artist, activist and academic creating radically politicized work in their native Chicago and New York City. Gamboa is a member of Free Street Theater and founder of the ensemble The Young Fugitives, and a member of the New York Neo-Futurists. They are finishing doctoral studies in American Studies at NYU. Gamboa has a Joyce Award and an International Connections Award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Their current projects include the underground news show The Hoodoisie, the, community-based theater piece Meet Juan(ito) Doe and the web series BRUJOS.
Liliana Angulo is a multi-media artist, researcher, educator, and curator from Colombia whose work has been featured in exhibits across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Her work engages questions of the body, the image, and their relationship to constructs of gender, ethnicity, language, history, and politics. Angulo has also pursued several collaborative projects with social organizations throughout the African diaspora. In 2015, she was among a group of Afro-Colombian artists who founded "Colectivo Aguaturbia" and who organized a gathering for Afro-Colombian artists entitled “Encuentro de Artistas y Agentes Culturales Imaginación Radical Afro I.R.A.” Angulo currently lives in Colombia.
Participants:
- Amarilis Pérez-Vera
- Antônio Souza
- Eduardo Leão
- Emily (Nell) Haynes
- Joiri Minaya
- Katelyn Wood
- Krizia Laureano Ruiz
- Luis Arturo García
- Mateus Gonçalves
- Matthew Leslie Santana
- Paula Valentina Roa Dueñas
- Quanda Johnson
Holiday Inn Mexico City-Plaza Universidad

Dirección / Address / Endereço: 1056. Col. Santa Cruz Atoyac, Ciudad de México
Accesible para silla de ruedas/ Wheelchair accessible/ Acessível para cadeirantes
Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar

Dirección / Address / Endereço: Justo Sierra 16, Centro Histórico, Cuauhtémoc
Accesible para silla de ruedas / Wheelchair accessible / Acessível para cadeirantes
Baños semi-accesibles en el Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso / Semi-accessible bathrooms available in the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso / Sanitários semi-acessíveis no Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso
Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso

Dirección / Address / Endereço: Justo Sierra 16, Centro Histórico, Cuauhtémoc
Planta baja accesible para silla de ruedas / Ground floor wheelchair accessible / Térreo acessível para cadeirantes
Baños en el piso 2 y 3 accessibles por montacarga / Bathrooms on floors 2 and 3 accessible by platform lift / Sanitários no piso 2 e 3 acessíveis por elevadores para cadeirantes)