Hart House and The Institute for Dance Studies (IDS) invites you to its 2024 keynote lecture, presented by sought-after scholar and speaker Thomas F. DeFrantz.
About
The institutionalization of dance in academic settings has forced a reckoning with genre, access, aesthetics, and colonial histories, at least. This talk focuses on the ways that dance resists containment by institutions. Calling on the rhetorics of dance as protest, as erotic demonstration of possibility, and as manifestation of outrageous style, we wonder together at the ways dance arrives outside of the scaffolding of the linguistic, to demonstrate ways to be in relationship to authority while moving in another direction.
Doors will open at 1:30 PM with event programming starting at 2 PM.
The IDS Keynote Lecture will be followed on Saturday, February 3 by a workshop. “Doing Us: Dancing Beyond the Institution” will be led by Thomas F. DeFrantz and hosted by the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (CDTPS). For general event inquiries and workshop RSVPs, please contact Institute for Dance Studies RA Martin Austin at [email protected].
Note: Space for the workshop is prioritized for CDTPS students/faculty and IDS membership.
About IDS
The Institute for Dance Studies (IDS) is a research institute at the University of Toronto that advocates for dance studies within the academy, and for the value of dance beyond performance. Hosted within the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, IDS supports dance-focused scholars, students, and artists through meetings, events, working groups, workshops, practice pop-ups, resource sharing, and our annual Keynote Lecture and Workshop Series. IDS was founded in 2016 by Seika Boye following the “The Other D”: Locating Dance in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in Canada Symposium, which you can learn more about here.
While IDS does not offer courses or grant degrees, it supports and collaborates with people working in a range of curricular and non-curricular contexts across disciplines, including Theatre and Performance Studies, Music, Kinesiology, Education, Physiotherapy, and History.
IDS has an ongoing partnership with Hart House. IDS and Hart House share a commitment to expanding dance-focused programming at the University of Toronto through community and academic collaborations. Learn more about Dance at Hart House here.
Speaker Bio
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Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Segal Design Institute and the Dance and the department of African and African American Studies. DeFrantz specializes in African diaspora aesthetics, dance historiography, and the intersections of dance and technology. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016. Creative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017.
Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; Juilliard; Movement Research; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; SNDO; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. DeFrantz has directed many productions across a long career, including GeVa Theater, Karamu House, and a residency at the New York Public Theater. He currently directs the research group SLIPPAGE, a group that works to create innovative interfaces for the telling of alternative histories. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, Palgrave, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, Duke University Press, 2014) and editor of Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Wisconsin University Press, 2002), which received the CHOICE award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the 2003 Errol Hill Award presenting by the American Society for Theater Research. He has published extensively, with his monograph Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004) receiving the 2004 de la Torre Bueno Prize for outstanding publication in Dance. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association.
DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. DeFrantz has chaired the Women’s Studies program at MIT, and the African and African American Studies Department at Duke. He is past president of the Society of Dance History Scholars, and founder and director of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, as well as the Black Performance Theory working group. DeFrantz has received the Distinguished Research Award from the Dance Studies Association in 2017, and had work nominated for a “Bessie” Award in 2020.
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