Description:

“Serious Competition: Criticism, Performativity in International Hip Hop”

This talk deals with international competitions and their increasing role in rejuvenating and circulating dance in the U.S. and abroad. Drawing from fieldwork around the “Olympics” of Hip-Hop and his own judging experiences, Lorenzo Perillo interprets adjudication as a form of criticism, cultural practice, and discipline. Judges face the unusual task of standardizing Hip-Hop, and thus underscore the contradictions in evaluating race, gender, ethnicity, and technique, in a global context.

Dr. Perillo is Assistant Professor of Global Asian Studies and member of the Racialized Body research cluster at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to his appointment, he held the position of Andrew W. Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. He earned his Ph.D. in Culture and Performance and Concentration in Asian American Studies at UCLA. He is and alumnus of Culture Shock, a professional Hip-Hop dance company and non-profit organization dedicated to youth outreach, and his research is featured in Theatre Journal, Internationl Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Hip-hop(e): The Cultural Practice and Critical Pedagogy of International Hip-Hop. His current book project uses ethnography and choreographic analysis to explore the role of Hip-Hop aesthetic practices in Filipino communities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Bodies in Motion speaker series is part of the Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities Project

Co-Sponsored by: The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, The Program in American Studies, the Department of Art History, the Dance Program, Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies, the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Drama, and the Department of Performance Studies.