October 28-31, 1999
Invitations
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Crossing Borders/Crossing Centuries
October 28-31, 1999
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The ASA/CAAS Program Committee Presents
Friday, October 29, 1999
4 P.M.
Grande Salle de Bal Ouest, Le Centre Sheraton
Free Admission
A Performance by Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Hellmut Gottschild
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Brenda Dixon Gottschild has performed internationally as a professional actor-dancer and teacher-director, and has published her scholarship widely in anthologies and professional journals, as well as in her book-length study Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Her work has earned her a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, as well as positions as Distinguished Minority Scholar in dance departments at a variety of institutions. Currently she is Professor of Dance at Temple University. |
| Hellmut Gottschild has helped found three dance companies: Gruppe Motion Berlin, Group Motion Media Theater, and ZeroMoving, which has performed throughout the US and Europe. Since 1993 his work in Germany and the US as a solo performer has employed a wide range of theatrical means, pure movement works, improvisational events, and collaborations. He has received a number of commissions, and his work has earned a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, among other awards. Currently he is Professor Emeritus of Dance at Temple University. |  |
Bridging boundaries and blurring divisions between theater, lecture, and discussion, this performance session draws upon Dixon Gottschild's research, her background in avant-garde theater, and Gottschild's active involvement in performance as a dancer and choreographer--as well as their personal experience. (Brenda was brought up in 1950s Harlem; Hellmut grew up in Nazi Germany, East Germany, and West Berlin.) The team is interested in finding a performance voice/mouthpiece for historical discourse, in bridges and continuities, in thresholds and disjunctions, and in body image as a vehicle for "passing" and masking. Avital C. Bloch will moderate a discussion immediately following the performance.
The ASA/CAAS Program Committee Presents
Saturday, October 30, 1999
4 P.M.
Grande Salle de Bal Ouest, Le Centre Sheraton
Free Admission
A Reading
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Thomas King will read from his soon-to-be-released novel Truth and Bright Water. King's other work includes Medicine River, One Good Story, That One, and Green Grass, Running Water, a novel that earned him a Governor General's Award nomination. He has also edited All My Relations (an anthology of contemporary Canadian Native literature), a special issue of Canadian Fiction Magazine (1988), and The Native in Literature. King teaches Native literature and creative writing at University of Guelph and writes "The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour" serial for CBC Radio. After the reading, he will lead the audience in a more general discussion of the state of Native literature. |
On Medicine River: ". . . the finest of all Mr. King's many subtleties involves Will--for in his uncertain parentage and lack of drive, he is formed as an image for the state of all the Blackfeet. Native North American but disconnected from their heritage, citizens but not at home in the ambitions of the world, they drift with their fates. This most satisfying novel ends as it should, not in a clash of cymbals, but with the brushes laid quietly against the drums for a beat or so after the music ends." --New York Times
The ASA/CAAS Program Committee Presents
Saturday, October 30, 1999
7 P.M. Grande Salle de Bal Ouest, Le Centre Sheraton
Free Admission
A Performance by Jerry P. Longboat
Jerry P. Longboat is Turtle Clan from the Mohawk/Cayuga Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Six Nations of the Grand River, Southern Ontario, Canada. Raised both on and off reserve, he has travelled as a singer and traditional dancer from an early age. A diversified artist, Jerry creates from the oral traditions and hereditary cultural narratives of his people, and brings them into the present for the purpose of shaping "original" stories for performance. Jerry has received intensive cultural training as a dancer artist, choreographer, and rehearsal master, and has premiered his first choreographic work, "Seeing Voices." He lives in Vancouver where he trains in various modern forms, including Butoh Dance.
"My traditional teaching is to know the body as memory . . . The blood, bones, hair and tissue is my human heritage and my body is the vessel that resonates with the ancient languages of instinct and intuition . . . Shamans' Circle represents a creative investigation into the role of the 'Holy Man' in traditional and contemporary Hautinonshonni culture. It represents a shamanic journey through the ages . . ."--Jerry Longboat
The ASA/CAAS Program Committee Presents
Saturday, October 30, 1999
8:30 P.M. Grande Salle de Bal Ouest, Le Centre Sheraton
General Admission: $10.00
Student Admission: $5.00
Performances by Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana
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Holly Hughes has performed her work throughout the US, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. Dress Suits to Hire, which Hughes wrote for Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, won an OBIE for Shaw's performance in 1994. Hughes' work has earned grants and funding from the Rockefeller, Ford and Aestrea Foundations. She has also worked with groups to create theater pieces based on personal narrative, such as "The Talking Cure" at DeMonfort University in England. She has taught workshops at Yale University, the Graduate Writing Program at Brown University, Barnard College, and others. Hughes is currently at work on a new solo with acclaimed director/designer/performer Dan Hurlin, and is also working on a collection of plays from the first ten years of the WOW Cafe, which she will co-edit with Carmelita Tropicana. |
The work of Holly Hughes can be characterized as performances of crossing; that is, performances that transgress and traverse fixed notions of nation and identity. Her art gained national prominence when the National Endowment for the Arts denied her funding. In "Preaching to the Perverted," Hughes will meditate on her past transgressions, especially her controversy with the NEA; thus the performance will address issues of censorship, transgressive art and the future of the arts, citizenship, national identity, sexual identity, and crossing.
| Carmelita Tropicana, named by El Diario one of the Outstanding Latinas in theatre, is a writer/actress who has won fellowships from the Cintas Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her solo "Milk of Amnesia," published by the Drama Review, appears in the Grove Theatre anthology O Solo Homo: Queer Performance. She and director Ela Troyano co-wrote the film Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen, which won Best Short Film at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival. Recently she finished an Off Broadway run of the one-woman show Late Night Catechism and presented her play Chicas 2000 at Performance Space 122. Her book Good with the Tongue, a compilation of her plays, stories, and film script, is forthcoming from Beacon Press this fall. |  |
"Milk of Amnesia" is one woman's travelogue, which shifts from the US to Cuba, from modern to colonial times, from public persona to private self. It presents an array of characters, some male (Pingalito Betancourt, a cigar chomping macho Cuban bus driver), some female (Carmelita Tropicana, a cross between Lucy and Desi), and some animal (Arriero, Hernando Cortez's horse). The piece, written and starring Carmelita Tropicana and directed by Ela Troyano, explores issues of identity, loss of cultural memory, and a recuperation of memory. The set was designed by Peruvian sculptor Kukuli Velarde.