In her first book, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018), scholar Genevieve Love explored characters with physical disabilities as central to early modern drama’s understanding of the operations of the theatrical medium itself. Her new book, Shakespeare and Disability Theory (Bloomsbury, 2025), grows out of that same interest in disability’s links to theatrical aesthetic strategies. It also turns outward and pushes onward. Where her earlier work centered on the self-contained “figure” of disability, her new work follows disability’s movement — the ways disability circulates in plays, refracts among bodies, intersects with other aspects of identity, tracks through theatrical time.

In this talk, Love unsettled the relation of disability and character through a series of encounters with the question of recognizing disability in literary, dramatic representations. Disability might be recognized in Shakespeare and other early modern dramatic texts not — or not only, not mainly — in the static singular character, but among characters and plays: in networks, in intertexts, in performance histories, in motion.

About the Speaker

Genevieve Love is Professor of English at Colorado College. Her work focuses on the intersection of disability and theatricality in Shakespeare and early modern drama. Her new book, Shakespeare and Disability Theory (Bloomsbury, 2025), serves as a guide to the intersections of Shakespeare studies and disability studies. Intervening in contemporary critical debates about recognizing disability representations in dramatic texts, the book explores the stakes of embodying disability in Shakespearean performance. Love’s earlier book, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018), argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related “likeness problems” that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She also edited the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607) for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020).

Presented by the Disability Studies Working Group at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies presents theDon Wilmeth Endowed Lectureship in American Theatre featuring
Anita Gonzalez

Thursday, November 13
5:30 PM - 6:30PM
Ashamu Dance Studio

“Dance for All People… a movement and medicine duet” will be screened at The Warren Alpert Medical School on Monday, Nov. 10. Filmmaker Deanna Camputaro of D Camp Photography & Filmmaking LLC and Rachel Balaban of DAPpers collaborate to bring you the inside story of this extraordinary program combining RI seniors, medical students from The Warren Alpert Medical School, and area dance ensembles of all ages using the art of dance to improve health and strengthen community. A portrait exhibition will accompany the film. Members of DAPpers and medical students will be present for a talk back with the audience after the 10 minute screening. Curious about the art/medicine connection? Join us and meet the filmmaker, program founder, and members of DAPpers.

Watch the trailer.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies presents
Improvisation Class with Forsythe protege Jill Johnson!

Tuesday, October 28th
7:00 - 8:30 PM
Ashamu Dance Studio

An improvisation class employing William Forsythe-based technologies for generating and modifying movement. Led by Forsythe protege, Jill Johnson (@jilljohnson.dance).
For Questions, please email patricia_seto-weiss@brown.edu

Open to Brown Students 18 years of age and above.
What to wear: Dance attire, no shoes or socks 
Photo credit: The Copier, by Jill Johnson & David Poe. Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

Jill Johnson is a dancer, choreographer, and educator with a global presence, having performed on over 60 tours across 5 continents.

She was a principal dancer in William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, and Director of Dance at Harvard University where she led transformative, equity-driven initiatives. Her commissioned works have been featured by Rambert Dance, L.A. Dance Project, and the American Repertory Theater.

Ms. Johnson has collaborated on dance, opera, theater, and film productions including those for Sadler’s Wells Theatre, PBS, and The Louvre. Her recent work Analogue, for Rambert, received critical acclaim and was lauded by The Stage as one of the top 5 dance productions in the UK, in 2024. She has also taught master classes worldwide and held residencies at prestigious institutions such as The Edinburgh Festival and Baryshnikov Arts Center. She is a Senior Fellow at Collegium Helveticum, Swiss Institute for Advanced Study, in Zurich.

John Cameron Mitchell will introduce the fascinating subjects of one of his new performance works: the French Surrealists Claude Cahun and her partner in life, in art, and in anti-Nazi activism, Marcel Moore.

Residency co-sponsored by the LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative and the Brown Arts Institute, with additional support from the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies

Graduate Colloquium (TAPS 2980) presents

Nadje Al-Ali
Robert Family Professor of International Studies
Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies, Brown University

Nadje Al-Ali is a Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000. Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. More recent publications include (jointly with Deniz Kandiyoti and Kathryn Spellman Poots) Gender, Governance & Islam (University of Edinburgh Press, 2019) and Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques (ed. With Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor, University of Edinburgh Press, 2024).

Join us for a networking event specifically for students interested in working across various artistic fields. Students will meet a small group of alumni working in the industry that can share invaluable insights and career path stories, and create connections with students interested in a career in the arts.

Date: October 16, 2025
Time: 5 PM ET
Location: Career Center, Kobliner Conference Space, 167 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02912

REGISTER

Participating Alumni:

• Angela Robinson ’92 - TV and Film Writer, Director, and Producer
• Becka Vargus Katz ’94 - Senior Dance Curriculum Specialist and Teaching Artist at The Juilliard School and Lincoln Center Education

The classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, now with CGI tails! The Jellicle cats come out tonight… With an introduction by Sydney Skybetter and Raja Feather Kelly.

Plus, a special pre-screening event: Cats for Cats by CATS! BAI’s Creative Arts and Technology Spaces (also known as CATS), have created an augmented reality cat filter! Take pictures as a cat and decorate a pair of your very own free cat ears. Meow!

About Rigorously Curated

A festival of films that put the “CULT” in culture! This season’s selection of films rigorously curated by Sydney Skybetter and guest-curator Raja Feather Kelly includes: Cats, Black Swan, Ex Machina, Hedwig & The Angry Inch, Twilight, Suspiria (1979), Annihilation, and Arrival. Join us every Wednesday, October 1–November 12, 7 PM.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies
Graduate Colloquium (TAPS 2980) presents

Leon J. Hilton
Book Launch:
COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES: NEURODIVERGENCE AND THE ERRANCIES OF PERFORMANCE

Friday, September 26
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Andrews House, Room 110
Cogut Institute
13 Brown Street
Providence, RI 02912

What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspective to the study of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, Counter-cartographies offers a bold reimagining of neurological difference, moving beyond rigid diagnostic frameworks to uncover more expansive, generative modes of existence.

Remarks by Leon J. Hilton with responses from:

• Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman
  Professor of American Studies & English, Brown University
  
  
• Amanda Anderson
  Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities & Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities, Brown University
  
  
• Joshua Chambers-Letson
  Professor of Performance Studies & Asian American Studies, Northwestern University
  
  
• Moderated by Patricia Ybarra
  MacMillan Family Professor of the Humanities, Brown University

Everett’s In Each Other’s Arms invites us to consider death as a teacher, a companion, and a mirror to life. Drawn from true and deeply personal stories, the work explores the meanings, emotions and rituals of loss that we create and carry.

Tickets are free but to ensure entry, recommended.

Everett’s In Each Other’s Arms invites us to consider death as a teacher, a companion, and a mirror to life. Drawn from true and deeply personal stories, the work explores the meanings, emotions and rituals of loss that we create and carry.

Tickets are free but to ensure entry, recommended.

Brown Arts Institute invites undergraduate and graduate students to the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and The Lindemann Performing Arts Center for our Fall 2025 Open House! Come learn about BAI’s many resources and opportunities for students. BAI staff will be giving out swag, sharing useful info, and answering all your burning questions about Brown Arts Institute, including but not limited to:

• What ARTS courses are being offered this semester?
• How do I request space in Granoff or The Lindemann?
• What exhibition opportunities are available to students?
• How do I get grant funding for my creative endeavors?
• What are the Creative Arts Technology Spaces and how do I get access to them?
• What’s going on at The Bell? The Lindemann? Granoff?
• How do I stay in the know?
• What the heck is an Entreflaneur and how do I get involved??

Whether you’re a new or returning student, stop by and say hello. The BAI staff are excited to greet you!

And make sure to visit The Bell gallery to see our latest exhibition ERIC-PAUL RIEGE: ojo|-|ólǫ́.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies 

OPEN HOUSE & ICE CREAM SOCIAL
September 3, 6 PM
Leeds Theatre, 83 Waterman Street

Explore the Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies! Meet our faculty and staff, learn about their roles and the courses they offer, and discover exciting performance and production opportunities.

Stick around for our Ice Cream Social, where you can mingle, dance, and enjoy some sweet treats. During the ice cream social, you can join an info-session for upcoming Machinal and The Flick auditions. Don’t miss out on this chance to connect and learn more about our department!

SPRING FESTIVAL OF DANCE
produced by Patricia Seto Weiss

The Lindemann Performing Arts Center
144 Angell Street, Providence RI 02906

This year’s Spring Festival of Dance will be held for the very first time in the Main Hall of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center on May 1st and May 3rd.
The Festival will feature two distinct programs.

May 1, 8PM | Program A
featuring the
MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY

Sold Out: Waitlist Procedures

• For sold-out performances, a waitlist will open one hour before each performance.
• Available tickets will be distributed to the waitlist on a first-come, first-served basis, no earlier than 15 minutes before the beginning of each performance.
• Individuals must be present to be added to the waitlist.
• We will seat as many people as possible while adhering to fire safety and capacity laws.

We are excited to host the Martha Graham Dance Company, currently celebrating their centenary, in Program A (May 1 at 8pm). The company will present Martha Graham’s iconic Appalachian Spring, a work of optimism and determination conceived during the darkest days of World War II. The score, by Aaron Copland, will be performed by musicians from the Brown University Orchestra under the direction of Mark Seto. The evening will conclude with Jamar Roberts’s We the People to music by Rhiannon Giddens.

All performances will include Lamentation Variations, an evocative work inspired by Martha Graham’s iconic 1930 solo, Lamentation. This ongoing variations project, originally created in remembrance of 9/11, continues to explore grief, resilience, and expression through movement. Brown University students will present three new variations, created under the project’s signature creative conditions, choreographed by Laila Franklin, Heidi Henderson, and Patricia Seto-Weiss.

May 3, 2PM & 8PM | Program B

Tickets on Sale Now:
Students $7
Adults $15
65+ $12

Program B will showcase student performers in a diverse lineup choreographed by guest artists, TAPS faculty, and Brown student Billie Miro Breskin ’25. The program opens with a new work by Anya Cloud and Makisig Akin conceived with the Lindemann Performing Arts Center in mind. Paul Singh’s acclaimed Just Your Ambition, premiered at Brown in 2023, will be one of the highlights on the bill. TAPS faculty Ali Kenner Brodsky presents a new work for students in the Intermediate Dance course. Patricia Seto-Weiss again joins forces with intermedia artist John Crawford (University of California, Irvine) for a ballet piece immersed in projection, with music performed by members of the Brown University Orchestra.

All performances will include Lamentation Variations, an evocative work inspired by Martha Graham’s iconic 1930 solo, Lamentation. This ongoing variations project, originally created in remembrance of 9/11, continues to explore grief, resilience, and expression through movement. Brown University students will present three new variations, created under the project’s signature creative conditions, choreographed by Laila Franklin, Heidi Henderson, and Patricia Seto-Weiss.

The Festival of Dance is generously supported by the Julie Adams Strandberg Fund for Dance at Brown and the Sue E. Perlmutter Fund for Dance.

In collaboration with The Brown Arts Institute & The Music Department

Join us for music, dance, and laughter as we learn Israeli Folk Dancing with Pazit Lahav.

The Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre presents The Black Lavender Experience, our annual celebration of theatre and conversations sparked by queer artists of color.

This year’s program features Uncover and Discover Self, a constellation of new short plays created and performed by students in AFRI 0990 - Black Lavender: Black Gay/Lesbian Plays/Dramatic Constructions in the American Theatre, instructed by Stacey Karen Robinson.

Uncover and Discover Self includes installation design by renowned costume designer Qween Jean, in conversation with students, multidisciplinary theatre artist Stacey Karen Robinson and Guest Director-in-Residence, Shariffa Ali.

We invite the campus community and beyond to hear these new plays and participate in rituals that honor our self discovery journey.

A conversation with the artists will follow the performance.

The Experience is free to attend. Suitable for audiences 13+ with an accompanying adult.

Please RSVP to secure a seat.

More about our special guests:

Qween Jean is a New York costume designer and human rights activist who has fully committed her voice to the advocacy of marginalized communities. She has designed costumes for Liberation, Swamp Dwellers, Wedding Band, Jordans, Macbeth In Stride, Walden, Amen Corner, Seagull, and Cats: The Jellicle Ball at PAC NYC. Qween founded Black Trans Liberation, organization that provides weekly access, food, groceries and housing resources for the TGNC community. Jean is the author of Revolution is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation (Aperture). In 2023, she joined the Board for TCG. 2024 Audelco Award, Obie Award for Excellence in Costume Design; finalist for NYC David Prize. MFA from NYU Tisch. Learn more at blacktransliberation.com

Stacey Karen Robinson

Stacey Karen Robinson (she/they) is a queer multidisciplinary theater artist. Stacey creates experimental solo work about the emotional & Spirit lives of Black folx. She received a commission from True Love Productions, was a Resident Artist at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club (59th Season) and was a Bushwick Starr Reading Series playwright (2020-2021). She was awarded an Art Matters Grant (2019). Stacey performed her solo work, You Never Can Always Sometimes Tell, at JACK (NYC) and Salvage Vanguard Theater (TX). A previous monodrama, Quiet Frenzy, is published in solo / black / woman, Northwestern University Press (2014). As an actor, Stacey has appeared on numerous stages and collaborated with notable theater makers including Black Lavender Experience luminaries Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones. Stacey received a BA in Africana Studies from Brown University and was fortunate to be a student of Black Lavender Experience Founder, Associate Professor Emeritus Elmo Terry-Morgan.

Shariffa Ali

Shariffa Ali is an international creative leader committed to advancing radical change through the power of art & activism. She works across disciplines directing and producing plays, virtual reality experiences & film. Originally from Kenya and raised in South Africa, Shariffa has been a New York resident since 2013 where she has worked primarily as a director and administrator. Her artistic endeavors have extended beyond conventional boundaries, encompassing pioneering Afrofuturist virtual reality projects showcased at esteemed venues including the Sundance Institute Lab and the Royal National Theater. Her directorial achievements encompass acclaimed productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Off-Broadway premieres at Classic Stage Company. Read more here.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies, New Directions in Palestinian Studies at the Center for Middle East Studies, and the Brown Arts Institute presents

Samer Al-Saber Book Talk
A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Palestinian Theater

We are pleased to invite you to join our next spring session of the Elemental Media Lab: “CROSS POLLINATION” a faculty and graduate student flash panel. We will meet Tuesday, March 18th, 6-7pm for this next installment and hope you will join us for dinner afterwards as well. This meeting will be held at the Cogut, Andrew’s House in room 310.

Since space is limited, RSVP is required. Please RSVP if you would like to join. We are thrilled to host short 3-4 minute flash presentations by the following:

• Amanda Macedo Macedo (TAPS): “Echoes of a Disappearing Giant: Sounding the Elemental in Media and Matter”

• Elisa Giardina Papa (MCM): “She Flickered In and Out of History”

• Istifaa Ahmed (AMST): “Light, Skin, and Chemical: At the Beginning and End of the World”

• J.M. Nimocks (MCM): “Reflections on the role of deceit in vitalist philosophy”

• K Yin (AMST): “What Remains: Asian/Rock Form(ation)s”

• Sara Ossana (RISD): “Space, Place, Becoming and Unbecoming: A Question of the Alchemical”

• Tao Leigh Goffe (Hunter College-CUNY): “You gonna run to the rocks / The rocks will be melting”

From this audition, Laila Franklin will cast 5-7 dancers with a diverse skill set in contemporary dance. Participants should expect to remain for the full two hours of the audition and engage in both composed and improvisatory audition materials. Please be prepared to work both in solo and in group work. Note: to be considered for this cast, dancers must be available for all rehearsal and performance dates and hold availability for the listed tech dates.

The Cast will be notified via email by the end of the day Monday, March 17

Rehearsal Dates:
April 12: 11:30 AM - 5:30 PM
April 13: 12:00 - 6:00 PM

Tech Rehearsals:
April 26 - May 2

Performances:
May 1: 8PM
May 3: 2PM & 8PM
The Lindemann Performing Arts Center

Lamentation Variations was an event originally conceived to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11. It premiered on that date in 2007. The work opens with a film of Martha Graham dancing movements from her then-new, and now iconic, solo, Lamentation. The variations that follow were developed under specific creative conditions. Each choreographer was asked to create a spontaneous movement sketch of their reaction to the Graham film, and was required to adhere to the following conditions: only 10 hours of rehearsal, public domain music or silence, basic costumes and lighting design. Though it was planned to be performed on only one occasion, it has now become an ongoing creative project licensed by the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Laila Franklin will create one variation on a group of Brown University students to be presented at the Spring Festival of Dance on May 1st and 3rd, 2025 in the main hall of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center. The May 1st performance will feature the Lamentation Variations performed by Brown students in a shared playbill with the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Brown faculty from diverse disciplines will discuss how their research and scholarship intersect with and promote dialogue across different viewpoints. The panelists will participate in a discussion moderated by President Christina H. Paxson, covering topics such as multidisciplinary approaches to promoting respectful dialogue, effective practices for facilitating and engaging in open inquiry, and how the Brown community can address obstacles to the free exchange of ideas.

Registration is open. Participants are invited to submit questions at the time of registration.

Panelists

Oriel FeldmanHall, Associate Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences

Barbara Tannenbaum, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

Andre C. Willis, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Moderator

Christina H. Paxson, President of Brown University

About the Project

This event is part of the Discovery Through Dialogue project, which furthers Brown’s mission by amplifying and fostering new opportunities for meaningful conversations across a wide range of perspectives. Ensuring that Brown continues to unlock knowledge and understanding through productive and respectful dialogue is a shared project of our campus community. Learn more: discovery-dialogue.brown.edu

What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to tend to the gaps? Building on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” this symposium showcases research that considers the methods, contradictions, and possibilities of archival studies.

The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary set of projects on a range of topics, including: reading with and alongside ephemera, coloniality and institutional power, artistic responses to archival materials, embracing methodological failures, and the beauty of storytelling and personal archives, among others. Each speaker will complicate the assumptions of the “gaps” and “losses” in the archive in search for other modes of thinking with and alongside a range of archival artifacts.

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

Speakers

Presenters:

• Justina Blanco (Africana Studies)
• Alexander Chun (American Studies)
• Macie Clerkley (Anthropology)
• Brian Dang (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Nélari Figueroa Torres (Africana Studies, English)
• Jordan Good (Music)
• Erin Hardnett (History)
• Amber Hawk Swanson (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Brooke Johnson (Africana Studies)
• Lucas Joshi (Comparative Literature)
• Joyce Matos (Modern Culture and Media)
• Claudia Ojeda Rexach (History)
• Gery Vargas (RISD)
• Shuang Wang (Music)
• K Yin (American Studies)

Moderators/Hosts:

• Kiana Murphy (American Studies)
• Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro (Hispanic Studies)

Schedule

Image: A piece of art that has been altered to look like a collage, Heather Green, 2003

Join the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice for a lunch talk by Simmons Center Reimagining New England Histories Artist in Residence Sika Foyer.

The gaze in visual arts has been dominated by imperialist, colonialist and Eurocentric perspectives. Hence, it is essential for African and African Diaspora artists to take agency in documenting their own legacies and paving the way for a deeper understanding of their work. Central to this is the contemporaneity and need for ancestral legacy in Black visual arts.

Even when Sika Foyer says “I was born and raised in Togo (West Africa),” she finds herself wrongly tying her personal history to the collective narrative shaped by colonialist blueprints. These blueprints define what constitutes West Africa, the Togo region, and the Ewe tribes — their histories, cultures, and legacies — based on an imposed colonial framework. Foyer’s artistic practice and research focus on exposing what differentiates her cultural traditions and legacies from those of the colonialist narrative. This includes the techniques, materials, and color compositions she uses. For example, water plays a vital role in her work, both materially and symbolically. Historically, the Ewe tribes settled along the Volta River and its tributaries, expanding their presence across six countries: Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin. This broader geographic footprint reflects a more accurate representation of Ewe cultural heritage, including folklore, oral traditions, rites of passage, music and dance — all of which are central to her artistic expression. The Ewe tribes’ connection to the Volta River transcends the influence of colonial and imperial powers whose narratives were often dictated by their economic and/or political interests. By anchoring her work in this ancestral legacy, she aims to move beyond these external influences.

The talk includes a video recording of Foyer’s recent performance work on Governors’ Island which is central to developing and creating signs and symbols for her new language. She will discuss the four parts of the performance which include “Birth and Rebirth,” “Aging,” “Life Tribulations,” and “Life is a Gift — The Celebration of the Present.”

Foyer will show how and why she uses the five elements: water, fire, earth, wind and aether (space) drawing on her cultural traditions and ancestral legacy.

About the Artist

Sika Foyer is a Togolese-American, multidisciplinary research-based and conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic abstraction in her West African Oral tradition, rite of passage ceremonies, and music and dance rituals, to create narratives that examine all forms of social injustice. Foyer exposes the process of becoming through iconographic symbols with tireless gestural motions and micro-repetitive layering, which she refers to as the Trickster’s materiality of wrapping, and its cross-cultural rituals. She examines the powerful impact of such materiality of wrapping through body movements and sounds to formulate a new language made of sacred geometric figures and forms, signs and symbols echoing those evidenced in ancient pictographic languages such as Adinkra, Nsibidi and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Foyer was first introduced to drawing and fabric/textile design at age 8 by her mother. With a Bachelor’s of Science in Economics and a Master’s of Science in Urban Studies, Foyer pursued a career in corporate finance and economic development while developing her artistic practice until 2017 when she returned to academia to complete her M.F.A. in Visual Arts at Lesley University, College of Art + Design in Cambridge, MA. Hence, her art practice is both a socio-economic and a cultural reflection on who and what we become, weaving and weighing in the yesterday, today and the future of our lives.

Foyer’s artworks have been shown internationally and nationally in museums, galleries and alternative art spaces. Some of Foyer’s works are in private collections.

https://www.sikafoyer.com/home-1

Find her on Instagram: @sika_foyer

Join NAISI for its final Indigenous Artist in Residence events! 

A generative creative writing gathering that will explore attendees’ creative written work in a supportive environment, focusing on how we commonly, and uncommonly, document stories of survival. Participants will collectively explore and uncover their personal and/or researched accounts of survival within themselves, their families, or friends. 

Attendees, please bring the following: 

• • Pen/pencil 
  • Notebook of choice
  • 3 typed and printed hardcopies of their creative writing piece (6 page max)

RSVP below!

Artist Bio: Jacob L. Camacho is a CHamoru writer, educator, and activist. Originally from Guåhan (Guam) in the Mariana Islands, he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. He received his MFA from Rutgers University, Camden and his BA in English Literature from the University of Guam. His work has appeared in University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Literatures From Micronesia, TrailOff, Moonstone’s Featured Poets Anthology 2022, UOG’s
StoryBoard 18, and MadHouse Magazine. He is currently writing his manuscript, Talkboy, in which a CHamoru boy travels the world collecting stories in his talkboy recorder which was gifted by his grandmother. Unbeknownst to him, one of his tapes holds incriminating evidence that may alter a presidential election.

Led by Shariffa Ali, Guest Director in Residence at the Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre, this one-time intergenerational workshop delves into the powerful role that protest theatre played in the South African Anti-Apartheid movement.

Participants will explore the historical context that led to the rise of Apartheid and the subsequent mass resistance against this system of racial segregation. Through a mix of discussion and hands-on activities, participants will examine how the performing arts became a formidable tool for dismantling oppression.

In the spirit of South African protest theatre, participants will engage in creating original performance pieces that address contemporary socio political issues. The workshop will emphasize the body, encouraging participants to view obstacles as opportunities for creative expression. By the end of the session, participants will have begun to craft a unique piece of protest theatre that speaks to the challenges and injustices of our time.

Free and open to the public ages 16+
Dinner Served at 5:30pm | Workshop 6-9pm

Reservation required.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies
Graduate Colloquium (TAPS 2980) presents

Katie Brewer Ball, Wesleyan University
Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Theater Department
Affiliated Faculty, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Friday, October 25 (Snacks Provided)
1:00 - 3:00 PM
Lyman Hall, 007

This Face is Not for Us: The Erotics of Escape and the Fantasy of the Glory Hole

Katie Brewer Ball (KBB) is a writer living on Nonotuck land in Western Massachusetts. They are Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department at Wesleyan University, and affiliated faculty in the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Brewer Ball earned their PhD in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Their research and teaching interests include theater, visual culture, Black and Indigenous thought, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Their first book, The Only Way Out: The Racial & Sexual Performance of Escape, examines contemporary literature, theater, and performance works that deal with narratives of escape. They are also working on a second book project on art and science on the North Slope of Alaska. Their writing has been published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Artforum, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Criticism, RECAPS, Little Joe, Bomb Magazine, Dirty Looks, ASAP/Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and by BOFFO and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. In addition to teaching, Brewer Ball curates performance and art events, including the NYC performance salon, Adult Contemporary, and publishes creative nonfiction.

Written by Eric Lockley and Directed by Shariffa Ali, Sweet Chariot is a play in development at Rites and Reason Theatre. 

In this Afrofuturist epic, a disconnected father and heroic daughter become caught up in a cosmic journey to discover salvation in a mythic place called Home.

Presented as a dramatic reading featuring student and professional actors.

Showtimes

Saturday, October 19, 2024 at 7pm

Sunday, October 20, 2024 at 2pm. 

This performance is free and open to the public. Reservations are required.

All reserved seats are released ten minutes before curtain.

For directions and information regarding our space, please visit our website here.

Questions?

Please write to africana_studies@brown.edu.

About the Director 

About the Playwright

Friday with Friends:
Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Community Gathering & Lunch

Friday, October 18 (Lunch Provided)
11:30 AM - 2:00 PM
Lyman Hall, Becker Library
*Vegan & vegetarian options available

This is a casual, come-and-go gathering to enjoy time with friends, faculty, staff, casts, crews, creative teams, Sock and Buskin board members, and anyone interested in learning how to get involved with TAPS.

Bring a friend! All are welcome!
We look forward to seeing you!

HONEY is a durational performance by Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila. Viewable from different vantage points, Fila releases liquid globes of honey onto thin metallic gold threads as Tolentino swallows the weighty, sticky fluid over a three-hour interval. HONEY has been presented across the world since 2009 in artistic and academic settings as a form of collective study. Reflecting pressured, receptive, and resistant spaces of connection, the work aims to respond to the contexts in which it is performed. At Brown, HONEY’s final live iteration is accompanied by projected archival video documentation and is hosted by the Department of Modern Culture and Media’s Elemental Media Conference.

Free and open to the public. No reservation required.
Guests may enter the performance as space allows.

Join us for music, dance, and laughter as we learn Israeli Folk Dancing with Pazit Lahav.

Join us for an immersive workshop that bridges the power of movement with the art of theatre-making, designed to cultivate creativity, collaboration, and community. Drawing from training in South African theatre practices and principles of grassroots organizing, this workshop invites participants of all backgrounds and experience levels to explore the dynamic relationship between body, space, and storytelling.

Through a series of guided exercises, participants will engage in kinesthetic explorations that challenge traditional boundaries of performance and encourage deeper connections with one another. We will focus on how physicality can be a conduit for expressing complex narratives, fostering empathy, and activating social change. This workshop aims not only to enhance theatre-making skills but also to build a vibrant, supportive community that values each voice and perspective.

Whether you are a seasoned theatre practitioner or simply curious about the intersection of movement and social engagement, this workshop offers a unique opportunity to learn, create, and connect in an inclusive environment.

This event is open to the public. Registration is required. 

About Shariffa Ali 

Shariffa Ali is an international creative leader committed to advancing radical change through the power of art & activism. She works across disciplines directing and producing plays, virtual reality experiences & film. Originally from Kenya and raised in South Africa, Shariffa has been a New York resident since 2013 where she has worked primarily as a director and administrator. 

As an interdisciplinary artist, producer, and arts administrator, she champions creative leadership and fosters environments conducive to artistic growth and exploration. Her work at the intersection of humanitarianism and performance reflects a steadfast belief in the transformative power of storytelling and interdisciplinary collaboration.

To read more, click here.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies 

OPEN HOUSE & ICE CREAM SOCIAL
September 6, 6 PM
Leeds Theatre, 83 Waterman Street

Explore the Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies! Meet our faculty and staff, learn about their roles and the courses they offer, and discover exciting performance and production opportunities.

Stick around for our Ice Cream Social where you can mingle, dance, and enjoy some sweet treats. During the ice cream social, you can join an info-session for upcoming Angels in America auditions. Don’t miss out on this chance to connect and learn more about our department!

The Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre presents the annual Black Lavender Experience, a celebration of theatre and conversations sparked by queer artists. 

Black (Lavender) Angels Fest: A Ritual Performance

featuring yaTande Whitney V. Hunter, PhD with Kei Soares Cobb, Assi Coulibaly, Ronald K. Lewis, Mekbul Tahir, Shaffany P. Terrell

Ocean by Marcus Waller ’26 (student showcase performance)

About the Headliner

yaTandeWhitney V. Hunter, PhD (he/him/his) Chicago-born, Philadelphia-based artist. His work centers around cultivating individual and communal spirit through dance-performance, education and curation. Dr. yaTande’s choreographic and performance art works have been presented through Kumble Theater, La Mama, Grace Exhibition Space, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival and in the streets of NYC, Chicago and Detroit. He has performed with Martha Graham Dance Company, Rod Rodgers, Reggie Wilson, Martha Clarke, Kankouran West African Dance Company, and is currently Executive Artistic Director of Denizen Arts Project, co-created with his partner, theatre artist, Jude Sandy.

Dr. yaTande has been recipient of creation, performance, and exhibition commissions and grants from National Endowment for the Arts, Independence Fellowship, Providence Arts, Culture and Tourism; New York State Council for the Arts; Puffin Foundation; Harlem Stages; Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center; Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, and others. His academic degrees include: B.F.A in Theatre Arts/Dance (Howard University), M.F.A in New Media Arts and Performance (Long Island University), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Art Theory and Aesthetics from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (2013 David Driskell Fellow). yaTande serves as Assistant Professor of Dance and Coordinator of the African Diaspora Dance Series at Temple University.

Denizen Arts Project (DAP) is a multidisciplinary collaborative performance project conceived by dance/performance artist yaTande Whitney V. Hunter and theater artist Jude Sandy. Denizen Arts Project (DAP) was formed in 2016 to foster creative community and honor the cultural and art-making practices of African diaspora, queer and other global identities. DAP seeks to be a locus for the creation of new works and renewed discourses on contemporary complexities of the human experience.

The Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies presents
Introductory Workshop: Bharatanatyam with Sunanda Narayanan

Friday, February 2 (snow date 2/9)
4:00 - 6:00 PM
Lindemann Performing Arts, 310 (Movement Lab)
Dress: Comfortable dance or athletic wear, bare feet
Open to all levels

William Kentridge will give a talk entitled “Finding the Less Good Idea,” highlighting his art practice and the philosophies in relation to the creation of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, as an interdisciplinary art space based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Founded by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace in 2016, it is a physical and immaterial space to pursue incidental discoveries made in the process of producing new work.

The title of the Centre comes from the amusing and grammatically awkward Tswana proverb (translated by the great Sol Plaatjie in his book of 732 Setswana proverbs in 1916): “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor,” and it goes a long way to describing the interests at The Centre. Secondary pursuits, collective and collaborative artistic process is celebrated at The Centre and it is that to which it gives its attention and resources.

For Kentridge, The Centre for the Less Good Idea is a space that is partially informed by his own artistic practice and processes, while also affording him a space to experiment and collaborate with fellow artists, performers, and ways of working. It is this ability to be both in and outside of The Centre that sees Kentridge working to hold, inform, question, and draw out the seemingly disparate lines of thought that are necessary agitators and animators for the particular kinds of work that take shape in the mixed-media terrain of the space.

The newest and clearest example of this is ‘The Great YES, the Great NO’, a performance in development; creatively co-produced by William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea, the piece follows a boat trip from Marseille to Martinique – a small island that was an important site for many well-known figures including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, André Breton and Josephine Baker. Using the potential of the boat as a metaphor for power, trade, migration and more, the production will draw on many of the processes and methodologies that have become central to both Kentridge and The Centre’s ways of working.

This event is first come, first served. RSVP is encouraged, but does not guarantee a seat. Walk-ins are welcome.

A conversation with Sharon Bridgforth, moderated by Eric Gottlieb ’25.

The Department of Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre is proud to host Sharon Bridgforth as part of Black Lavender 2023. A 2023 United States Artists Fellow, 2022 Winner of Yale’s Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, Sharon Bridgforth is 2020-2023 Playwrights’ Center Core Member, a 2022-2023 McKnight National Fellow and a New Dramatists alumnae. She has received support from The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Her work is featured in Volume 110, No. 4, Winter 2022 of The Yale Review, Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Mouths of Rain an Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, Feminist Studies Vol 48 Number 1, honoring 40 years of This Bridge Called by Backand But Some of Us Are Brave! Sharon’s new book, bull-jean & dem/dey back (53rd State Press 10/2022) features two performance/novels that will be produced by Pillsbury House + Theatre in Minneapolis 2022/2023.

About the Event

In conversation with live artist Tania El Khoury, we will discuss her art, the role of her audiences, and the political potential of her work: What does it mean to do interactive art? What are the politics of her work? What are the experiences of an Arab feminist artist exhibiting and performing around the world? This conversation is part of a joint CMES Brown University and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University series on gender, art, and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. The series examines intersecting inequalities and body politics expressed, represented, and transgressed in both visual and performance art.

Registration Required 

Digital Histories Conference, November 4-5

Friday, November 4th | Day One

Friedman 102

Opening remarks and Panel 1: 3:30-5:30 pm

• Kavi Duvvoori, University of Waterloo: “To Put a Folding Hand Fan at U+1F__? Specification and Negotiation of Emoji Within the Unicode Consortium.”
• Yu Hao Chen, University of Pittsburgh: “Telling the Fortunes of Early Chinese Braille: Toward a Digital Divine.”
• Padmapriya Govinadarajan, New York University: “Flooded Memories and Monsoon Media: Mediating an Environmental History of the Present.”

Coffee break

Keynote: 6:30-7:30 pm

Mara Mills

Overload: Switchboard Automation and the Disability History of 0s and 1s

Abstract:

Histories of “the digital” often foreground Claude Shannon’s 1937 M.A. thesis, in which he applied Boolean algebra to switching circuits, laying the foundation for digital computing today. This talk takes a closer look at the origin of these circuits, specifically telephone switchboards and the operators who worked them. Thinking alongside Frantz Fanon’s mid-century insights about telephone operators, surveillance capitalism, and overwork, Mills discusses disability as a management factor leading to digitization and automation.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is co-founder and editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Most recently, she is the co-editor of Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford, 2020) and Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, forthcoming spring 2023). She is also co-founder and co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, where she is currently directing the NSF-funded project How to be Disabled in a Pandemic. More information can be found at her website.

Digital Histories Conference | Day Two Schedule

This is an event in two parts in two different venues

Event Program

Panel 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Gifts of the Gnawa: A Conversation among Musicians and Scholars
Brahim Fribgane, Hassan Hakmoun, Richard Jankowsky, and Mike Rivard
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer, Providence, RI 02912

Concert 8:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Live Performance
Club d’Elf and Hassan Hakmoun
Repair Atelier, 271 N Main St, Providence, RI 02903

About the Event

The Maghrebi micro-festival presents performances by world-class talents in the tradition of Gnawa, a musical form and Sufi healing practice that originated among the Moroccan Gnawa, an ethnic group descended from West African slaves. Complementing a live performance by Club d’Elf and Hassan Hakmoun, a panel discussion will cover the history of Gnawa as a people, a music, a religious practice, and a healing tradition. Tufts’ University ethnomusicologist Richard Jankowsky, and musicians Hassan Hakmoun, Mike Rivard, and Brahim Fribgane will reflect on the rapid ascent and growing global popularity of Gnawa music in recent years, including its substantial influence on musicians beyond the Gnawa tradition.

About Club d’Elf

To the naked eye, Club d’Elf looks exactly like a world-class instrumental band: five or six fierce players laying down heavy grooves and exploratory solos on distinctive original material, as audience members dance or listen in rapt attention. To its fans, however, and its large and colorful cast of musicians, D’Elf is all that and much, much more.

The paradox and the power of the unusually named Club d’Elf become increasingly clear through repeated encounters. Unlike almost any other band, D’Elf’s personnel changes radically from show to show. Fans have their favorite configurations and players, but unlike groups where musicians’ tenures are finite, D’Elf-ians revolve in and out, reappearing in endless combinations. Beyond the cavalcade of characters, the music itself is in constant flux. Individual songs can vary dramatically from performance to performance as new alignments of players make every moment fresh. No two sets are alike. Yet the feeling and philosophy that animate D’Elf remain consistent, the product of the vision and dedication of leader Mike Rivard (aka Micro Vard) and the ongoing contributions of his talented collaborators. Devoted fans have been setting their clocks by the group’s bimonthly appearances at their home base, the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for twenty years now, and the message has traveled around the world.

ABOUT JULIUS FLEMING, JR.

The Graduate Program in the Department of Modern Culture and Media invites you for a talk with Dr. Pooja Rangan of Amherst College. Her lecture is entitled “Listening in Crip Time: Toward a Countertheory of Documentary Access” and will feature a response from artist Jordan Lord on October 6th, 2022 at 7:00pm.

Access is conventionally understood in documentary parlance in adversarial and transactional terms, as a leveraging of power or resources to gain entry to realms deemed to harbor documentary value. Dr. Rangan’s talk, grounded in readings of Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko’s Goodbye CP (1972) and Jordan Lord’s Shared Resources (2021) and drawn from her forthcoming book, The Documentary Audit, excavates the role of disability expertise in shaping a crip countertheory of access as a shared responsibility: one that demands crucial but generative adjustments to the acquisitive habits of documentary listening. Hara and Kobyashi’s disabled collaborators, Yokota Hiroshi and Yokotsuka Kōichi, leaders in an advocacy group of people with cerebral palsy, were important influences on Hara’s confrontational and globally acclaimed post-vérité aesthetic, whose values and forms come under transformative attack in Shared Resources. Rangan positions Hara and Kobayashi’s adversarial withholding of linguistic access to normative listeners as a precursor of Lord’s more invitational embrace of sensory access features as formal and narrative principle. She responds to their efforts to listen in solidarity with the out-of-sync temporal experiences that disability scholars call “crip time” by producing an archive of their listening modes, which she terms dis-entitled listening in the mode of crawling rather than staring, and sideways listening that cultivates an appetite for access intimacy.

Pooja Rangan is Chair and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Her research begins with documentary, but opens onto larger questions regarding power, difference, and the human. Rangan is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary(Duke University Press, 2017), which won the 2019 Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association. This book uses participatory documentary to tease out the implications of documentary’s founding humanitarian ethic: giving a voice to the voiceless. She is currently at work on her next book project, On Documentary Listening, which is about how documentaries audit the world, and the values they endorse when they hold themselves and others to account. She has also written about topics such as racism and postcoloniality, immaterial child labor, animal art, seriousness in documentary, and Indian cinema in a number of journals, books, and anthologies such as Camera Obscura, differences, World Picture, and Film Quarterly.

Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access and documentary. Their video and performance work has been shown at festivals and venues including DOCNYC, Performance Space NY, Artists Space, Anthology Film Archives, and Camden Arts Centre, and they have been in study with the group No Total since 2012. Their solo exhibition “After… After…” was presented at Piper Keys in 2019. Lord currently teaches at Hunter College in the Department of Film and Media.

This event is co-sponsored by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies and the Disability Studies Working Group at the Cogut Institute for Humanities.

Students, faculty, and staff, join us for Israeli Folk Dancing guided by Pazit Lahav of Brookline Folk Dancing. No experience necessary.  

Join us for a lecture and discussion with renowned musician, writer and activist TM Krishna. TM Krishna will also offer a music focused workshop for musicians at Brown on September 27th (more details).

About TM Krishna
The pursuit of a rigorous and multivalent art form like Karnatik music presents many intersections for a contemporary practitioner. In his primary identity as a Karnatik musician TM Krishna has had a brilliant and early start since the early 90s, going on to add more dimensions and ingenuity to his musicianship while simultaneously broadening his artistic concerns with every passing year.

Trained with the distinguished gurus, B. Seetharama Sarma, Chengalpet Ranganathan and Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Krishna’s concerts reflect his rigorous learning as a wholly classical musician. His concerts are able to please the most fastidious of rasikas as well as a community of musicians across generations while also being infused with his own distinctive aesthetic choices and expression. Simultaneously original, subtle, traditional and innovative, this is an example of a musician’s ability to expand the territory of its influence. Maintaining the exacting standards of the form as a musician and also as a writer, researcher and critic, TM Krishna has widened the reach of Karnatik music among new and eclectic audiences in India and abroad. This ability to draw in new listeners and communicate the magnificence of Karnatik music without intimidating them with references to the famed exclusivity of its form or its historical position as a rarefied genre, is a rare instance of transcending the structures of a limiting ecosystem while being located within it.

Please register to join us for a workshop on musical technique with renowned musician, writer and activist TM Krishna. TM Krishna will also deliver a lecture in the same space on the following day (more details).

Please join us for a panel discussion, Race& Performance in America on Tuesday, April 19, 2022, at 12 p.m. The discussion will feature:

• Nikki A. Greene, Visiting Scholar in Humanities, Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College
• Helina Metaferia, Assistant Professor of Visual Art
• Patricia Ybarra, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

The event will be moderated by Richard M Locke, Provost and Schreiber Family Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs.

For bios and more information on the Race & in America curated by Brown’s Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost, please visit, https://www.brown.edu/go/raceamerica. 

CC and ASL are available for this event. To request assistance for this event, please contact Event Strategy and Management at universityevents@brown.edu or 401-863-3100.

This weekly series brings together local artists, architects, writers, thinkers, musicians at the Center for Public Humanities to discuss their work with the public, every Thursday at 6 pm. A short presentation will be followed by Q&A and a convivial gathering in a fairly intimate setting. 

Today: Avery Willis Hoffman, Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute, will explore the challenges (and opportunities) of launching a new institute for the arts during a turbulent pandemic era.

The Conversations Series is funded by the Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of the Fine Arts.

*All individuals – regardless of vaccination status – must wear masks indoors, unless in a private, non-shared space or when actively eating. In addition, social distancing of at least six feet must be maintained when unmasked. Unvaccinated individuals must continue to wear a mask outdoors when social distancing of at least six feet is not possible. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all COVID-19 University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event.

The Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative hosts “Over the Rainbow: (Re)Considering the Pride Flag(s),” a virtual panel discussion among artists, scholars, cultural critics, educators and members of the public that examines the popularization and symbolic use of the original rainbow pride flag as well as subsequent iterations of and alternatives to it.

Here is the link to join the webinar: https://brown.zoom.us/j/92252451920

The rainbow pride flag was designed as a symbol of the gay community by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978, becoming a well-known international symbol of “gay pride.” Since that time, the rainbow flag has come to signify a broader, global LGBTQIA+ coalition, even as there have been proposals for changes to the rainbow flag (such as the addition of stripes or chevrons to signal racial inclusion and trans inclusion) and for the creation of additional flags, featuring their own unique color schemes to represent various groups in the wider LGBTQIA+ community. The popularization of the original flag, as well as these re-designs and additions, have been both lauded and critiqued, with commentators raising questions of aesthetics, politics, and performativity; the commercialization, commodification, and branding of queer identities; international homogenization and/or local heterogeneity; diversity, inclusion, and intersectionality; the recognition, representation, and/or reification of specific identities; and so on.

This symposium will explore those issues and reconsider the pride flag(s) through a lively discussion moderated by Lynne Joyrich, professor of modern culture and media and director of the LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative. 

Panelists:

• Liz Collins, multimedia artist
• Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Alex Verman Green, writer, cultural critic, political theorist, and law student 
• Ivan Ramos, assistant professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University

The panel complements the research agenda of the Pembroke Seminar “Color” and is presented with support from the Friends of the Pembroke Center.

Here is the link to join the webinar: https://brown.zoom.us/j/92252451920

The Pembroke Center’s 40th Anniversary

The 2021-22 academic year marks the 40th anniversary of the Pembroke Center. The center was founded in 1981, a decade after Pembroke College—the coordinate women’s college of Brown University—merged fully with the men’s college. As the greater community honors 130 years of women at Brown, the Pembroke Center is delighted to celebrate its history of cultivating interdisciplinary work on gender and sexuality through its research, teaching, archival and community-building programs.

Shivaike Shah, co-founder and director of Khameleon Productions, an all diverse production company focused on platforming the stories and talents of creatives of color, will discuss his latest film project, Uprooting Medea. The talk will feature clips from the film as well as a Q&A. Registration encouraged. Free and open to the public.

Khameleon Productions, co-sponsored by the Brown Arts Institute, presents the Uprooting Medea tour, which will take place from February to May 2022.

The four-month tour, curated and produced by BAI Visiting Artist Shivaike Shah, will commence at Brown as part of their inaugural Interrogating the Classics Series and will continue across 12 states, visiting over 30 of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Khameleon will visit classes, work with students in script workshops and participate in roundtable conversations with students and staff around multiple topics related to the project.

Khameleon Productions was founded in 2020, based on a production company built at Oxford University where Francesca Amewudah-Rivers originally adapted the play. Their Medea reimagines Euripides’s Greek tragedy with an all-global majority cast and crew, and features original compositions, movement and spoken word commissioned by the company.

Join BAI for an open conversation about Medea and the Classics as we explore and question contemporary themes of race, belonging, identity, home and otherness. Registration encouraged. Free and open to the public.

Khameleon Productions, co-sponsored by the Brown Arts Institute, presents the Uprooting Medea tour, which will take place from February to May 2022.

The four-month tour, curated and produced by BAI Visiting Artist Shivaike Shah, will commence at Brown as part of their inaugural Interrogating the Classics Series and will continue across 12 states, visiting over 30 of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Khameleon will visit classes, work with students in script workshops and participate in roundtable conversations with students and staff around multiple topics related to the project.

Khameleon Productions was founded in 2020, based on a production company built at Oxford University where Francesca Amewudah-Rivers originally adapted the play. Their Medea reimagines Euripides’s Greek tragedy with an all-global majority cast and crew, and features original compositions, movement and spoken word commissioned by the company.

A core component of CSREA’s mission is supporting faculty and advanced students in the development of cutting-edge, collaborative intellectual work. The “What I Am Thinking About Now” series provides a collegial, productive workshop space for faculty and graduate students to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. Scholars test ideas and receive feedback from a diverse and supportive group of scholars on Mondays throughout the semester.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1 | 12-1PM

Breaking Down, Breaking Together: Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing and the Ethics of Encounter

Iván Ramos, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

—

This essay considers the fragility of social relations through an understudied action that reveals the limits of sociality: laughter. Using Latina artist Xandra Ibarra’s ongoing performance piece Nude Laughing, the essay suggests that to face the body of another subject laughing is to face the uneasy reality of encounter. In the piece, Ibarra emerges mostly naked, wearing nothing but a plastic breast plate and a pair of yellow high heels, while dragging a large nylon bag containing various accoutrements of white femininity like ballet slippers, pearls, and other objects. The majority of the piece consists of Ibarra breaking onto a manic fit of laughter that goes on for several minutes at the time. In order to analyze this piece, I delve into long histories of laughter, focusing on the unease that it produces when one witnesses a body laughing, and especially on the ways in which women’s laughter can result in violent retribution from men who fear being laughed at.

Analyzing three iterations of Nude Laughing across geographic locales, this essay lingers in the kinds of reactions the piece produces in its audiences. Ramos shows how the uneasiness of bodies established through the performance reveals the sense of discomfort when one encounters a body contorted, made strange, culminating in an act of male aggression during a performance in Mexico City. Ultimately, he argues that to encounter an/other’s body laughing, especially across difference, rather than an impasse might provide a radical possibility to engage with a feminist and queer ethics of encounter.

—

Iván A. Ramos is an assistant professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. He was previously an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC Berkeley and his BA in Critical Gender Studies from UC San Diego. Iván is originally from Tijuana, Mexico. Iván’s broader research investigates the links and slippages between transnational Latino/a American aesthetics in relationship to the everydayness of contemporary and historical violence. In particular, he is interested in how the aesthetic may provide a way to engage with an ethics of difference. His work brings together performance studies, queer and feminist theory, Latina/o/x American Studies, and media and film studies.

Join the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance in a virtual celebration of the Class of 2021. 

Un/Commoning Pedagogies Symposia: Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Embodied Practices
Various Dates: February 24 - March 10

Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective —Dasha A. Chapman, J Dellecave, Adanna Kai Jones, Sharon Kivenko, Mario LaMothe, Lailye Weidman, Queen Mecca Zabriskie —are a cohort of artist-educators committed to centering dance, embodiment, and social justice via our pedagogical work. We teach across the intersections of diverse fields: Anthropology, Sociology, Black and Africana Studies, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Dance, and Performance Studies.

Registration Required
Event links will be included in your confirmation email
http://brown.edu/go/UnCommoning

SCHEDULE

March 10: 11AM - 12:00 PM EST
Un/Commoning Pedagogies Symposia
As a collective, we critically position movement and embodiment as a method for forging anti-racism and collectivity in our classrooms and beyond. We assert that anti-racism is something that must happen collectively, as opposed to as individuals or proclaimed experts. We practice anti-racism together, in dialogue, in critique, and with commitment to both embodiment and care. Rooted in our ongoing collaborations and experimentations, we invite you to co- generate knowledge about the shared possibilities and tensions of teaching and learning, via our full-bodied selves.

March 29: 4PM - 6PM EST
Queer Colaborations with J Delllecave and Mario LaMothe

Join Brown Arts Initiative for a performance of Left and Right. In this time of intense divisions, a left partisan and a right partisan speaking with each other seems like an impossible conversation - or, at least, a conversation that is impossible to have meaningfully on certain so-called “hot-button” topics and complex realities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or immigration.

This devised, interactive online multimedia performance stages scenes that feature such conversations … performed by both human actors and bots. The human and machinic actors play different characters that embody, complicate, and deconstruct different types of performative, prescribed political identities on the left-right spectrum (approached with a US-focus but through a transnational lens). These political identities are shown to be not static or unalterable, rather, the result of relational, performative processes that occur over time and with technology. Theatrically playing with(in) these processes, Left and Right aims to call forth more capacious ways of being - and being political.

Presented by Brown Arts Initiative. Free and open to the public. Registration required.

Concept & Directing: Ioana B. Jucan
Text: Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Marcela Mancino, Fabiola Petri, Ioana B. Jucan, Melody Devries
Actors: Marcela Mancino, Patrick Elizalde, Andra Jurj, Fabiola Petri
Digital Design and Development: Tong Wu, Nuntinee Tansrisakul & Yuguang Zhang
Theatrical Design: Marcela Mancino
Bot Design: Roopa Vasudevan
Bot Concept: Roopa Vasudevan, Anthony Burton
Choreography: Adriana Barza
Sound Design: Peter Bussigel
Production Manager: Madeline Greenberg
Dramaturgy: Melody Devries
Performance Consultants: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alex Juhasz, and the Beyond Verification Team associated with the Digital Democracies Institute (SFU)

Taylor Mac’s irreverent seasonal spectacular “Holiday Sauce” reimagined as a virtual celebration!

Christmas as calamity—2020 Ibsen Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac and his long-time collaborators, designer Machine Dazzle, Music Director Matt Ray and producers Pomegranate Arts join together to celebrate the holidays in all of their dysfunction. Holiday Sauce… Pandemic! will blend music, film, burlesque and random acts of fabulousness to reframe the songs you love and the holidays you hate. There is more to the holidays than rampant capitalism and gift giving and in Taylor’s world, creativity and imagination are their own spirituality. This holiday season will be bittersweet for so many— Taylor Mac reminds us of the collective power of our chosen families, a message that will be of particular resonance this year when so many have lost so much.

“a present from the island of misfit toys…a Christmas miracle” (LA Times)

“Mac casts a cathartic spell…for all those who find caroling, eggnog and enforced family visits destabilizing.” (LA Times)

Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce… Pandemic! was commissioned by the International Ibsen Festival and the National Theatre of Norway with additional support from FirstWorks with Brown Arts Initiative, Artpark-Lewiston, NY, ASU Gammage at Arizona State University, Berliner Festspiele, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Curran-San Francisco, The Guthrie Theater, The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, Live Arts Miami, OZ Arts Nashville, Park Avenue Armory, Seattle Theatre Group and On The Boards, Stanford Live at Stanford University, Teatros del Canal Madrid, TO Live, UtahPresents, and Wexner Center of the Arts at the Ohio State University.

Trigger warning! Performance may include mature content and is intended for adult audiences

Pay what you can – 75% of ticket price goes to the artist   (suggested contribution: $10)

“Are we really together now?” At a time when it’s tough to feel connected, Black Hole Super Nova Daughter explores space, time, the body, and finding space within oneself. It all happens here. We invite you to journey with us as we heal and find home. The culmination of our poetry into performance ensemble begs the question: what is the story of our lives coming together?

This is the end of the semester performance for the creative ensemble led by Kym Moore and Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo for TAPS 1280B / MUSC 1285B.

Every year we are reminded of the holidays when familiar things start popping up around our communities: candy canes, red and green balls, plastic Santa, twinkling lights, and nostalgic music on the radio. Some of these things bring us cheer…and others, not as much.

Join Brown Arts Initiative for a conversation with filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane and Prof. Karan Mahajan, Department of Literary Arts. Tamhane and Mahajan will discuss Tamhane’s film Court.

Chaitanya Tamhane is an independent filmmaker based in Mumbai. His debut feature film Courtpremiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, where it was awarded the Best Film - Orizzonti and the Lion of the Future award. It has since gone on to win over 30 awards at film festivals worldwide. Courtwon the National Award for Best Feature Film and was India’s official entry for the 2016 Oscars. Court, in which a social activist who uses folk music to spread his message is arrested and accused of inciting a sewage worker’s suicide is available to view online Nov 10 - 15.

Presented by Brown Arts Initiative as part of the REMAKING fiction/nonfictionseries taking place Nov 10 - 15. This mini series features artists complicating “truth” by means of imaginative interventions, complicating what’s “made up” via worldly interruption, complicating authorship by questioning authenticity and ownership, and ultimately finding ways to push the messiness of “real” and “fake” into our faces for renewed consideration To view a complete list of events visit the REMAKING fiction/nonfiction page.

Join Brown Arts Initiative for a conversation with Raja Feather Kelly and Professor Sydney Skybetter, department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Kelly and Skybetter will discuss Kelly’s work The Love Episode, available for a limited run viewing Nov 10 - 15 online here.

Choreographer/Director Raja Feather Kelly is the artistic director of New Brooklyn Theatre. In 2009, he founded the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory. The two companies merged in 2018. Raja has been awarded a Creative Capital Award (2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018),

The Love Episode is a 2017 American docufiction performance, which premiered as part of Lumberyard in The City June 22-24, 2017. Directed by Raja Feather Kelly, the performance stars Kelly and his company as themselves performing a post-ballet theatre musical that reimagines and attempts to recreate the unrecorded, deleted and lost footage from Saturday Night Live’s 2015 Episode on Love and War (The Love Episode).

Presented by Brown Arts Initiative as part of the REMAKING fiction/nonfictionseries taking place Nov 10 - 15. This mini series features artists complicating “truth” by means of imaginative interventions, complicating what’s “made up” via worldly interruption, complicating authorship by questioning authenticity and ownership, and ultimately finding ways to push the messiness of “real” and “fake” into our faces for renewed consideration To view a complete list of events visit the REMAKING fiction/nonfiction page.

Theater Mitu’s </remnant> is an interactive digital reimagining of the company’s 2018 live theatrical production built from interviews conducted around the world concerning death, loss, and what is left behind.

Part performance, part sound art, part interactive website - this online theatrical experience offers audiences an intimate reflection on how loss can scar us, shape us, and at times propel us towards change—towards understanding what we should fight for and why.

Presented by the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Brown Arts Initiative. Registration is required for this event. Registered participants will receive an automatic response containing a link and password to join the event. Free and open to the public.

Theater Mitu’s </remnant> is an interactive digital reimagining of the company’s 2018 live theatrical production built from interviews conducted around the world concerning death, loss, and what is left behind.

Part performance, part sound art, part interactive website - this online theatrical experience offers audiences an intimate reflection on how loss can scar us, shape us, and at times propel us towards change—towards understanding what we should fight for and why.

Friday’s performance will be followed by a live talkback with Theatre Mitu.

Presented by the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Brown Arts Initiative. Registration is required for this event. Registered participants will receive an automatic response containing a link and password to join the event. Free and open to the public.

Rites and Reason Theatre presents its first digital production–Songs of a Caged Bird, a new play by Christopher Lindsay MFA’21. This work tells the story of Lee Berry, a member of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. As part of the New York 21, Berry and 20 other party members were charged with conspiracy to commit crimes across New York City and jailed. Amid the pain of incarceration, his failing health, and the erosion of hope, Berry finds a way through.

The work will stream on-demand on our virtual theatrespace on Thursday, October 22 at 7PM. Join us again on Sunday, October 25 at 3PM for a live Folkthought conversation with our cast, crew, and the people who inspired the work.

Join the Brown Arts Initiative for a performance of Pass Me Not, part of the REMAKING the real Fall Festival. 

Saxophonist Leland Baker and tap dancer Orlando Hernandez collaborate on a new work highlighting the Africa diaspora and black culture through song and dance. The performance will be accompanied by a conversation with the artists moderated by Providence-based artist Erik DeLuca exploring and reconsidering the historic context for the work. Baker and Hernandez are accompanied by Kweku Kwegyir-Aggrey on bass. Videography by Andrew Drachman. Presented as a YouTube Premiere. 

The REMAKING the real Fall Festival will be held remotely from Sept 28 - Oct 2 and will feature events including:

• A keynote address by artist Kent Monkman
• Film screenings and artist talks including Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison and Shulie by Elisabeth Subrin
• A conversation featuring contemporary artist Lisa Reihana
• State of Urgency, an exhibition of posters from the Print Like You Give a Damn Collective, created during he Summer 2020 protest marches
• Community artist performances
• Plus artist talks, workshops, and more

Thank you to Rhode Island Latino Arts for providing space at Galería del Pueblo to the artists for rehearsals and filming. RILA has been celebrating and promoting Latinx art and artists in the state of Rhode Island since 1988. You can find out more and contribute here: http://www.rilatinoarts.org/.

Activating Deconstructions in Dance and Performance

Friday, May 1, 7PM

Interdisciplinary performance makers Sara Jimenez and Zavé Martohardjono will discuss their embodied approaches to invisible histories, dis/orientation, and deconstructing political and historical narratives, as well as address how their artistic practices are evolving in response to the current global health pandemic.

To join this event please use this link:  (THIS LINK WILL BECOME AVAILABLE A FEW DAYS PRIOR TO THE EVENT)

This event will be recorded and will be available via BAI at Home following the event. Check back for a link to the recorded event.

ARTIST BIOS:

Sara Jimenez explores the material embodiment of deep transcultural memories. As a Filipinx-Canadian artist, she is interested in materializing existing global narratives around concepts of origins and home, loss and absence. She works in collage, sculpture, installation, and performance, to create visual metaphors that allude to mythical environments and forgotten artifacts. Jimenez is a collector and alchemist. Among other things, she collects familial narratives, abandoned objects, debris, compost, colonial texts and photos, maps, and textiles. Through material experimentation, she combines and rearranges elements from her collections to complicate pre-existing narratives of place, lineage, and temporality.
Sarajimenezstudio.com

Zavé Martohardjono (b. 1984, Canada) is interested in weaving together political education, improvised dance, and physical healing practices to contribute to de-colonial and de-assimilationist projects. Both their facilitation and performance practices contend with political histories our bodies carry. Zavé has performed at the 92Y, The Kennedy Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, BAAD!, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, El Museo del Barrio, Gibney Dance, HERE Arts, Issue Project Room, Storm King Art Center, the Wild Project, and elsewhere. They are a 2019 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and 2019-20 Dance in Process artist in residence. Zavé studied Political Economy at Brown University (2006) and Documentary Filmmaking at CUNY City College (2009). Outside of dance-making, Zavé has worked in social justice advocacy for over a decade.
zavemartohardjono.com