Annual Meeting: Dance-Related Events and Papers

[Lena Leson]

Hello, all. Below is a list of the many events and papers related to dance and movement at this year's AMS Annual Meeting, held jointly with SMT and SEM.

We are particularly excited to see you all at our special session, Dance and the Evolution of Jazz Music in New Orleans, which will feature a keynote address by Brian Harker, Brigham Young University, followed by a workshop led by Giselle Anguizola (Dr. Queen G of New Orleans) on Friday, November 11 at 8pm (additional details below).

Please don't forget our annual business meeting—including elections—on Saturday, November 12 at 12:30pm! There will be a virtual participation option for this event; a Zoom link will follow in a separate email with instructions and the meeting agenda.

Thursday, November 10

Dynamics of Play in Music and Dance Analysis // 8:00AM – 10:00AM

• Dancing the Maṇḍala: Embodied Accompaniment, Social Play, and Conversation in Himalayan Music. Mason Brown, Kathmandu University and University of Colorado at Boulder
• Playful Variation in North Indian Courtesan Performance. Sarah Morelli, University of Denver
• Rebellion in the Salsa Club: Challenging Fundamental Music and Dance Structures Through Improvisational Interplay. Rebecca Simpson-Litke, University of Manitoba
• Context in Play: Embracing the Particular in Choreo-musical Conversation. Corinna Campbell, Williams College

Musical Gatherings, Climate Crisis, and Cultural Sustainability // 10:15AM – 11:45AM

• Carbon Footprints and Sustainable Music Cultures: International folk music gatherings in a climate emergency. Sarah-Jane Gibson, York St John University
• Gurl World: How the Global Climate Crisis Sent Utopian Dance Pop to Space. Jerika O'Connor Hayes, Abigail M. Ryan, University of Cincinnati, College Conservatory of Music

Festivals // 1:45PM – 3:45PM

• Chinese Opera for the Vegetarian Festival in Post-pandemic Thailand—A Localized Metaphor for a Healthy Lifestyle. Xiaorong Yuan, University of California, Los Angeles
• Music, Dance, Land Back: the Resurgent Efficacy of Métis Cultural Festivals. Monique Giroux, University of Lethbridge
• Legacies of Mardi Gras: Minneapolis Aquatennial and Milwaukee Summerfest. Andrew Martin, Inver Hills College
• Music Moves Europe: EU Cultural Policy on Festival Stages at Europe's Northern Fringe. Lucas Aaron Henry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Taiwanese Indigeneity: Language, Ritual, Eco-Performance, and Body // 1:45PM – 3:45PM Music and language (self-)revitalization and teaching for Pinuyumayan teachers in Taiwan. Shura Ng Taylor, National Taiwan University Icowa ko Lalan: Indigenous Musical Mixing as a Speculative Practice of Wayfinding. DJ Hatfield, National Taiwan University Call and Response between Voice and Body: Expressing Village Identity Through an Austronesian Taiwanese Chant-and-Dance. Chun-bin Chen, Taipei National University of the Arts Music and Taiwan's transition from a "garbage island" to an island of green. Nancy Guy, University of California, San Diego

Dance in the Early Twentieth Century // 04:00PM – 04:50PM

• Dancing Games or Playing Ballet? Soviet Sporting Culture in The Golden Age. Laura Kennedy, Furman University
• “La France marche dans un rythme glorieux”: Metaphors of Immigration and Colonization in the Tango Craze of 1913. Sophie Benn, Butler University
• Northern Exoticism, Northern Modernism: Ice Maiden (1927). Patricia Sasser, Furman University

Ecologies of Community: Shareholders, Kin, and Collaborators // 4:00PM – 5:30PM

• The Simultaneity of Binarity and Queerness in Opera’s Creation: A Rehearsal Ethnography of Sivan Eldar’s Like Flesh. Lea Luka Tiziana Sikau, Cambridge University, UK
• From Farm Shares to Jazz Shares: Alternative Community-based Music Presenting in Western Massachusetts. Jason Robinson, Amherst College
• “Less of a Performance, than a Kinship”: Inuit Drum Dance, Cultural Competence, and the Metacommunication of Ihuma in the Inuit Community of Ulukhaktok. Timothy Edward Murray, University of Florida

Zydeco and Cajun Dance Workshop // 7:30PM – 8:30PM

Sponsored by the SEM Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section and the SMT Dance and Music Interest Group

SMT Dance and Movement Interest Group Meeting // 8:30PM – 9:30PM

Friday, November 11

Grooving Political Discontent // 9:00AM – 10:30AM

• Groove Politics: Pleasure and Participation in Cuban Dance Music. Kjetil Klette Boehler, University of South-East Norway
• Sununu: Contesting Refugee Representations through Music in the Third Space. Katelin Nicole Webster, The Ohio State University
• “Dance ’til you drop, boogie ’til you puke”: Endurance as Value in Philip Glass and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. Anne Searcy, University of Washington

New Analytical Perspectives on Hip-Hop, EDM, and Post-Millennial Pop // 2:15PM – 5:30PM

• Inter-Rotational Form in Trap-Influenced Hip-Hop. Stephen Gomez-Peck, University of Alabama
• “After ‘After-the-end’”: Poetics of Evaded Closure in Post-Millennial Popular Music. Nathan Alexander Cobb, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Enjambment and Related Phenomena in Rap Delivery. Mitchell Ohriner, University of Denver
• Form as Process in Electronic Dance Music: Two Case Studies. Hannah Benoit, McGill University
  
• Music Analysis and the Politics of Relatability: Listening to Mitski’s Be the Cowboy. Toru Momii, Harvard University
  
• Squelching, Wobbling, and Whirring: Short Continuous Processes in Electronic Dance Music. Jeremy W. Smith, The Ohio State University

Dance and the Evolution of Jazz Music in New Orleans // 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Brian Harker, Brigham Young University; Giselle Anguizola, New Orleans; Christi Jay Wells, Arizona State University

“A great drummer dances sitting down. A great tap-dancer drums standing up” (Malone 1996, 95). The jazz critic Whitney Balliett wrote this chicken-and-egg adage in a 1973 obituary for Baby Laurence, a tap-dancer who collaborated with some of jazz music's greatest pioneers. When jazz emerged in New Orleans, dance surrounded it on all sides. Early jazz drew on previous dance music including brass-band marches from Mardi Gras parades, African rhythms from Congo Square, French Quadrilles, and Afro-Cuban habanera or contradanza. Significantly, early jazz was played for dancing at dance halls, and the embodiment inherent in it ignited creativity in both dancers and musicians. Last, but certainly not least, often the best jazz musicians were also dancers, and they described the rhythms and attitudes of dance as central to their conception of the music.

Several scholars have brought attention to the symbiotic relationship between jazz and dance from its roots through the bebop era (Hazzard-Gordon 1990, Malone 1996, Harker 2008, Guarino and Oliver 2014, Cockrell 2019, Wells 2021), but for many readers without dance experience, the connections between music and dance that provide the foundations of jazz remain abstract. Today, jazz is often heard by seated audiences at concerts, or it is disembodied entirely, heard on the radio or piped into cafes, bookstores, and wine bars.

This special session, sponsored by the Music and Dance Study Group (MDSG), will combine a scholarly presentation on the intertwined history of dance and jazz music with a dance workshop that will help attendees understand through their bodies the impact of dance on jazz music. The keynote address (Brian Harker, Brigham Young University) will be 45 minutes long with 15 minutes for questions, and the workshop (with introductory remarks by Christi Jay Wells, Arizona State University) will take 50 minutes. We had originally planned that the workshop would be led by the New-Orleans-based dancer Darold Alexander. The time scheduled for this session unfortunately conflicted with one of Darold's standing gigs, and we are grateful that his accomplished colleague Giselle Anguizola has generously agreed to step in to lead this workshop after the program was finalized.

The location of the American Musicological Society’s 2022 meeting in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz and an epicenter of American dance culture over the last two centuries, provides a unique opportunity to revitalize our understanding of the connection between music and dance in the history of jazz.

Organized by the AMS Music and Dance Study Group

Saturday, November 12

Embodiment // 9:00AM – 10:30AM

• Embodying Sexual Abuse in Voice: Babbitt’s Philomel. Jessica Anne Sommer, Lawrence University
• Some Embodied Poetics of EQ and Compression. William Mason, Wheaton College
• Beyond the Audible: Embodied Choreographic Syncopations in Rhythm Tap Dance. Rachel Gain, Yale University

SEM Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section Business Meeting // 12:15PM – 1:15PM

AMS Music and Dance Study Group Business Meeting // 12:30PM – 2:00PM

Remote participation option; Zoom link and other details to follow

Sunday, November 13

From Radio to Social Media // 10:45AM – 12:15PM

• "Our Flag Will Never Fall": Exploring the Role of Music Radio Broadcasting in 20th-Century Kurdish Resistance Efforts. Jon Edward Bullock, Yale Institute of Sacred Music
• “Listeners’ Ideal National Barn Dance:” Musical Personae and Downhome Virtuosity on 1930s Radio. David VanderHamm, Johnson County Community College
• Nomadic Listening: Tuareg Subjectivity in Niger across Radio, Cassette, and Social Media. Eric J. Schmidt, Boston University

Ethnographies of Pedagogy // 10:45AM – 12:15PM

• Teaching/Learning Arab Music in the Present-Day: The Muwashshah as the Basis for an Intersectional Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. Ziyad Khan Marcus, University of Alberta
• Talent in Two First Notes: Ethnographic Method and Teaching Method in Two Violin Lessons. Lindsay J. Wright, Yale University
• Cecil Sharp Past and Present: A Case Study of Contemporary Morris Dance Transmission and Ideology. L. Clayton Dahm, University of Washington

Looking forward to seeing you all soon, 

Lena (secretary-treasurer), Rebecca and Stephen (co-chairs)

--

Lena Leson (she/her)

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Dickinson College

PhD, University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance

[La Meira]

Dear Lena and all,

Thank you for this! Please note there is another session (so many overlapping sessions, unfortunately) that might be of interest:

Session

Flamenco and its Afterlives: Embodied Archive and Communal Practice Time:   Thursday, 10/Nov/2022:   10:15am - 11:45am Location: Grand Salon 24 Session Topics:   SEM

Session Abstract

Sponsored by the Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section

Presentations

"Flamenco and its Afterlives: Embodied Archive and Communal Practice." Organizer(s): Theresa Margaret Goldbach (San Antonio, TX), K. Meira Goldberg (Fashion Institute of Technology), Jennifer Mckenzie (N/A) Chair(s): K. Meira Goldberg (Fashion Institute of Technology) Flamenco has historically been overlooked in mainstream music and dance studies. However, looking at flamenco through a postcolonial theoretical lens can offer productive insights into the complex processes of culture’s embodied formation and circulations. This panel focuses on flamenco–and in particular on flamenco dance as an embodied musical and literary practice–as an archive and a methodology, as a way of knowing. Ranging in historiographical focus from medieval Iberia to the present, this panel explores how flamenco usefully and distinctively illuminates questions regarding the contestation of identities and spaces ranging from inside to outside, from pre- to post-national, from religious to racialized, from analog to digital. What are the afterlives of landmark live music and dance venues that die of COVID, capitalism, and the neoliberal distribution of funding? How does the flamenco community mourn these losses, and how is it reshaped through this process? How has flamenco practice and identity become an organizing framework for protest and activism in times of pandemic and financial crisis? What discourses of nationalism are activated in the advocacy of the national association formed to protect flamenco tablaos, clubs, on the verge of extinction, that have historically not only provided steady work, but also an essential training ground for flamenco artists? And what embodied knowledge, about the relationship of movement to music and text, for example, is accessible only through such sites of communal practice? Can such knowledge be used as a historical methodology? Zeroing in on particular moments in time, specific places and financial transactions, individual musical gestures and syntactic codes, these papers explore the deep   Presentations of the Symposium   “Yo no temo a la muerte”: Embodied protest as Resistance to the Death of Flamenco Tablao Villa Rosa Theresa Goldbach San Antonio, TX In this paper I analyze performative commemorations and protests surrounding the closure of flamenco tablaos (performance venues) in Madrid, Spain due to COVID lockdowns and lack of funding or support for artists and workers. In March of 2021, after a year of forcible closure due to COVID restrictions, the over a century old flamenco tablao Villa Rosa in the center of Madrid closed its doors for good. To commemorate the closure, performers staged a flamenco funeral outside the doors of the beloved site. This performance was one of several embodied protests staged over the year of lockdowns and closures in Spain to draw attention to the plight of flamenco venues and performers throughout Spain who were unable to work due to the nature of restrictions. These protests formed part of a global campaign to save live music venues and performers known as #alertaroja in Spain and #redalert in the US. The staging of a funeral not only implies an anthropomorphizing of the site but also that the closure is a form of death. COVID was the immediate cause of death but the financial structures of capitalism and neoliberal distribution of funding were the underlying conditions that aggravated it. Do embodied protests bring enough attention and support to the ongoing struggle of live music venues? If not, how can any communal performance cultures and socialities survive in the context of exploitation of urban real estate resources and cyclical financial and environmental catastrophes?   Gesturing Toward the Refrain: Using Flamenco Rhythmic and Verse Structures to Research Medieval Iberian Dance K. Meira Goldberg Fashion Institute of Technology How can practice-based dance knowledge fit and can be integrated into our study of history? While few traces of medieval dance survive, hundreds of poems from the medieval Iberian songbook have been conserved and exhaustively studied. These lyrics were sung and danced, and Western culture has retained many traces of this performance, from instruments such as the lute, to verse-rhyme structures in carols such as “Jingle Bells.” I propose using flamenco dance gesture, which is inseparable from music and verse structures, as a dance historical methodology. Medieval Iberian lyrics are strikingly similar to flamenco verses in incorporating a vuelta, a melodic and rhyming signal, into their structure, prompting the audience to join in—today in saying ¡Ole!—historically, in singing the estribillo, or refrain, after each verse. Because the audience sang the estribillo over and over, it was memorized and thus readily transmitted as a portable fragment from song to song and from generation to generation; indeed, the estribillo is central to flamenco practice today. I am studying a gesture that I call the “pellizco” (pinch), which embodies the vuelta, or coming end of the verse. The pellizco is fundamental to flamenco practice, done always, and by everyone—singers, guitarists, dancers, hand-percussionists, and listeners alike—foretelling the final ¡Ole! Referencing flamenco dance knowledge as a repository of non-White and non-elite practices, I am tracing a capillary system in Afro-Islamicate Iberia that nourishes the European canon, but whose unique nature and constituent elements are often blanketed by the politics of Whiteness.   SOS Tablaos Flamencos- Defending Live Flamenco Performance’s “Value” to the Spanish Ministry of Culture Jennifer McKenzie N/A In this paper, I examine the work of the Asociación Nacional de Tablaos Flamencos (ANTFES). This organization was established in 2020 in response to the grave financial pressure which tablaos (live performance venues for flamenco) and the artists who worked in them experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as tourism, travel, and live performance were heavily restricted. ANTFES’ stated aim was to appeal to the Spanish Ministry of Culture to secure financial support for tablaos and for the flamenco artists who work in them, both through direct payments and through the inclusion of tablaos and their workers in extended ERTE relief programs. In addition to direct petitions, ANTFES coordinated a series of online appeals by a number of flamenco artists using the hashtag #SOSTablaosFlamencos. How successful was ANTFES and #SOSTablaosFlamencos at accomplishing these aims, and what is the role of ANTFES for Spanish tablaos today? I will discuss the employment of discourses of nationalism in ANTFES’ work both by the founders and the artists who supported their efforts, situating them in the history of discussion of tablaos’ roles in the flamenco complex and in the lives of flamenco artists, flamenco’s role in the Spanish tourism industry, and the tourism industry’s role in the Spanish capitalist economy.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AMS Music and Dance Study Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ams-music-dan...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ams-music-dance/CAJJZ6hmKJK11dGTG9YHeuEgCmdMi0DPAj7fLfu_Hx52qdb9eLA%40mail.gmail.com.

--

...porque la vida se nos acaba,

y yo quiero morir cantando,

como muere la cigarra...

www.meiragoldberg.com