ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar takes up the intersections between poetics and choreography. In the context of the ACLA conference on “The Human and Its Others,” we will think about the ways in which the human body can become a figure for issues in poetics, as well as the ways in which various ideas of poetry often invoke the human body: as metaphor, as referent, as audience, as performance. Our papers will range in historical period and literary field, though most will take up issues in modern performance studies. Our conversation will attempt to offer wide-ranging definitions of both poetry and choreography. Dance performances as well as theories of dance, poetic texts as well as theories of poetry will be our subjects. We hope to end our seminar with a workshop performance of a piece by Jonathan Appels, performed by dancers from the American Ballet./p>

Friday, March 24

Rhonda Garelick, Connecticut College
“Scarring the Air: Loie Fuller and Modernist Physicality”
Terri Gordon, The New School
“Flesh Made Word: Kafka and the Poetics of the Body”
John Dorsey, Rikkyo University
Ntozake Shange’s Performative Poetry”
Philip Lorenz, Honors College, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“The Poetics of Dance: Psycho-Theology in Talk to Her”

Saturday, March 25

Rishona Zimring, Lewis and Clark College
“Modernist Dance Scenes”
Susan Nurmi-Schomers, University of Tuebingen
“Heinrich von Kleist, Oskar Schlemmer and the Articulation of Space, Bodies and Words”
Thom Hecht, London College of Fashion (UAL)
“Birds with Human Souls - A Semiological Appraisal of ‘The Dying Swan’ Costume”
Robin Calland, Southern Utah University
“ ‘muscular docility, also mentality’ “

Sunday, March 26

Jonathan Robinson-Appels, Company Appels
“Poetic Notation and Choreographic Structures”
Catherine Kodat, Hamilton College
“Of Flesh and its Others: Mark Morris’s “Dido and Aeneas”
Virginia Jackson, New York University
“Dancing Genre; or The Origins of the Ballad”