Description:

Mellon Dance Studies presents dinner and talks by doctoral students Amy Swanson and Mlondi Zondi. Questions or RSVP to elizabeth.schwall@northwestern.edu.

Talk #1
Amy Swanson (Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama)

Ambiguous Masculinities: Transgressive Erotics in Contemporary Dance in Senegal

What can contemporary dance tell us about the ways in which gender and sexuality are imagined outside the realm of verbal discourse? How do artists negotiate conflicting demands and expectations at the interstices of the local and the global? This paper explores two performances by Senegalese male choreographers, Hardo Kâ and Bamba Diagne, that present the male body “otherwise” against a backdrop of increasing sexual regulation in the public sphere.

Talk #2
Mlondi Zondi (Performance Studies)

What Queer Obscures: On Black Being, Dead Time, and the "Black-on-Black Violence" Mystification

This paper raises a series of provocations about the usefulness and also the mystifying properties of a “queer analytic” (both Western and “Indigenous African”) in reading and understanding the performance and visual art archive/repertoire of choreographer Mamela Nyamza (South Africa) and visual artist/activist Zanele Muholi (South Africa).

Bios

Amy Swanson holds a B.F.A. in dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation research explores the intersection of twenty-first-century cultural production in postcolonies and continued Western material and intellectual dominance through the lens of contemporary dance in Senegal. Amy is a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship.

Mlondolozi “Mlondi” Zondi is a movement artist with an interest in dance dramaturgy, curatorial practice, and pedagogy. Mlondi’s dissertation focuses on contemporary Black performance and visual art engagements with death and corporeal integrity. Using Afro-Pessimism and other aspects of the Black radical tradition, the research probes the relationship between black ontology and the ontology of performance. Mlondi received an MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine and a BA (Hons) in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.