dance scholars

Temple Dance Participates in Sustainability Week

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Last week, Temple Dance Department participated in Sustainability Week, Climate, Sustainability & the Arts video festival.

The festival opened Monday April 11 in the Science Education and Research building with Program 1, exhibited on the giant SERC Video Wall.

Program 1 included Professor Merián Soto’s One Year Wissahickon Park Project: Summer, which documents the summer cycle of the award-winning year-long project of 16 branch dance performances in Wissahickon Valley Park in 2007-08.

Te program also featured Professor Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks / between earth & water / ICE, and Prof. Michael Kuetemeyer’s Spilled Light.

Program 2 also took place on April 11 in Annenberg Hall 14,  2020 N. 13th Street. It included Temple Water Dances, a compilation of student dance and video works created and presented in celebration of World Water Day (2015-16). Temple Water Dances included excerpts of works by BFA, MFA and PhD students Kristen Bashore, Bonita Bell, Long Cheng, Leslie Cornish, Morgaine DeLeonardis, Angeline Digiugno, Marina DiLoreto, Amanda DiLudovico, Jessica Halko, David Heller, Kaylie McCrudden, Tyler Ross, Blythe Smith, Angelica Spilis, and Muyu Yuan.

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Pictured: MFA student Muyu Yuan in Temple Water Dances

 

Also on the program was Fishing for the Future, by Dede Maitre, and Superfundland, by  Daniel Kurtz, Christina Betz, John Tarquinio, Jesse Roehrer

-Merián Soto, Professor

Dance Studies Colloquium: Julie Malnig

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Dance Studies Colloquium: Julie Malnig

On April 14, 2015 Julie Malnig presented Rock, Rebellion, and Race: Televised Teen Dance of the 1950s and Early 1960s at the final Dance Studies Colloquium of the 2014-2015 academic year.

Malnig’s talk ended the series on a high note, introducing Temple dance faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students to her forthcoming work on the emergence of televised dance programs in the 1950s. She demonstrated how these shows not only presented, but created the American teenager as an identity and a highly coveted demographic for television advertisers.

Though the nationally aired American Bandstand was the most popular, Malnig shed light on the locally aired programs, such as Baltimore’s Buddy Deane Show. It was on these shows where the intersections between racial discrimination and the development of an American youth culture were most prevalent. Though most televised performances were segregated, many of the dances were actually crafted by African American teens permitted to dance prior to filming or beyond the reach of the camera’s lens. Like the critiques of American rock and roll, televised dance was also a practice of undocumented borrowing from African American culture. Thus, the emergence of the All-American teen is further evidence of, as Brenda Dixon-Gottschild would argue, the Africanist presence embodied in U.S. social, cultural, and historical life.

 

-Amanda DiLodovico, Ph.D Fellow, Dance Studies