Choreographies of Writing.

Susan Leigh Foster's "Choreographies of Writing" (2011) is an embodied exploration of dance and of writing as choreographic practices. In this performative lecture, Foster teases out the tension-historical and contemporary-between writing about dance, and dance itself. She points to performative writing as an emerging genre articulating and complicating the relationship between the two disciplines. Performative writing seeks to mirror or gesture toward the dancing subject instead of commenting upon dance from a disembodied, objectifying stance. Citing theorists and practitioners such as Emma Hammergren, Marta Savigliano, and Randy Martin, Foster dances along with and against the writing, deepening the textuality of the piece and further underscoring her central thesis: the choreography of dance and of writing are each corporeal, theoretical, and cultural. Here, Foster affirms that the praxis of choreography offers the makers of both art forms a means of communicating through signifiers that disrupt the traditional division, instead creating a duet of embodied, socio-cultural transformation. The lecture is followed by a Question and Answer discussion.

Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire, Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull, and Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. She is also the editor of three anthologies: Choreographing History, Corporealities, and Worlding Dance. Three of her danced lectures can be found at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage website.