Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop for:
Fabien Maltais-Bayda
Joint-PhD Student, Theater & Performance Studies and English Language & Literature
Who will present:
RECONSIDERING RECUPERATION IN CHOREOGRAPHY: LARA KRAMER’S NGS (‘NATIVE GIRL SYNDROME’)
Respondent: Dr. Bethany Hughes, Assistant Professor, Department of American Culture, Program in Native American Studies, University of Michigan
Tuesday, March 1,
4:30–6:00 PM CST
EXCLUSIVELY OVER ZOOM
Please register for the workshop HERE. The workshop coordinators will circulate the paper to all registrants and the Zoom link is made available upon registration.
(Please do not cite or circulate the works-in-progress without the author’s explicit consent.)
We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to TAPS workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu).
ABSTRACT: In Oji-Cree choreographer Lara Kramer’s NGS (“Native Girl Syndrome”), a sinuous choreography of shifting body states excavates familial histories. The piece centers on Kramer’s grandmother, who moved from a rural community to the city of Winnipeg as a young woman, experiencing addiction and homelessness. In this paper, I consider NGS alongside genealogies of feminist recuperative writing, in order to parse the work’s choreographic investment in intergenerational encounter, and to examine how it might enact, question, challenge, and expand the parameters of recuperation. Theorized through notions of identification and desire, this somewhat outmoded critical paradigm has largely been conceptualized with and through text, even as other traditions, including Indigenous theater and performance, formulate similar logics. NGS situates the moving body as essential to recuperative action, wielding its capacities to decidedly ambivalent ends. As such, this dance piece offers a productive space for interrogating how meliorative and resistive strands of queer and feminist thinking might generatively interact. My paper asks after the potentiality of a recuperative process that is both somatic and coalitional, locating ways of theorizing collaboration across difference within choreographic practice.
BIO: Fabien Maltais-Bayda is a second year joint PhD student in English Language and Literature and Theater and Performance Studies at UChicago. He is interested in the material, sensory, and aesthetic frames in which performing bodies are encountered, and his research focuses on choreographies that move across difference and interrogate corporeal contingency. Fabien’s writing can be found in Canadian Art, Canadian Theatre Review, The Dance Current, esse, and Momus, as well as in the anthology Curating Live Arts (Berghahn Books, 2018), and publications from the Art Gallery of York University and Blackwood Gallery.