Not About Race Dance is a collaborative, choreographic response to the homoraciality that haunts U.S. American postmodern dance. The work’s title reflects its primary impetus, Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance (1994), which discursively refused the project’s central focus to underscore its appeal for public acknowledgment of the lived experiences and losses of the AIDS crisis. Not About Race Dance employs this central paradox to call attention to how whiteness historically formed the structures, experiences, and experiments of postmodern choreographers; whiteness is the “not race” that Not About Race Dance exposes as a durable history and dominant social structure perpetuated through modern and contemporary dance practices. During this presentation, artistic director Gerald Casel and the other artists/collaborators will share and discuss this most recent choreographic explorations during COVID-19.
Gerald Casel is a dance artist, performance maker, cultural activator, and educator. He serves as the Provost of Porter College and is Associate Professor of Dance at UC Santa Cruz. He is the artistic director of GERALDCASELDANCE. His choreographic research and social practice converge to complicate and provoke questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power.
GERALDCASELDANCE is a San Francisco-based company that strives to invent new movements and structures that seek explanations for what humans fear, love, and hate. The company supports collaboration between dance, sound design, and emerging technology, mixing performance with recorded and live video projections to enhance the experience of seeing and feeling dance.
Date/Time
Oct 21, 2020 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 21st to receive Zoom link and password.