Radical Research:
Luna invests in dance research as a way to advance our field. We also investigate what dance research can be, who shares it, who has access to it, and how it can be presented. Our Radical Research panel seeks to amplify the reflective rigor and depth of discourse of BIPOC dance researchers, whose perspectives are often overlooked. Come hear how four dance artist scholars are actively shaping the field of research.
Join us!
Saturday, June 24
5pm Pacific
via Zoom
Free
Panelists
Crystal U. Davis
Crystal U. Davis, MFA, CLMA is a dancer, educator, movement analyst, and critical race theorist. Her research explores implicit bias in dance and how privilege manifests in the body. Her work has been published in the Journal of Dance Education, Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, and in her book, Dance and Belonging: Implicit Bias and Inclusion in Dance Education. As an artist, her performances span from Rajasthani folk dance to postmodern choreography examining incongruities between what we say, what we believe, and what we do. She is an Assistant Professor of Dance Performance and Scholarship at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches anti-racist pedagogy for dance and theater, modern technique, somatics, and movement analysis.
Crystal’s Research:
Crystal U. Davis’ research focuses on the operative mechanisms of implicit bias in Dance and how it pertains to matters of diversity and inclusion in the field. Their central research question addresses how dancers are socialized to see and understand the world and on how that perception affects the ways in which they interpret the physical movement or behaviors of others, the execution of dance performance, and the ability to assess styles of dance or aesthetic choices of dancers that do not align with the viewer’s sensibilities. The foundations and products of their embodied research can be found in the series of conference presentations, invited lectures, and professional development workshops created as well as peer-reviewed articles, chapter contributions to anthologies, and their first book, Dance and Belonging: Implicit Bias and Inclusion in Dance Education.
John-Mario Arcilla Sevilla
John-Mario Arcilla Sevilla, Director at Large at Luna, formerly directed the 92Y Harkness Dance Center, Dance Education Laboratory, NYC Ballet’s Education Department and was a recent NYU’s Asia | Pacific | American Institute Visiting Scholar. His choreography has appeared at CounterPulse, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, LaMaMa, NYU Steinhardt, Movement Research at Judson Church, 92Y Tisch Center, Dance Theatre Workshop, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, The Asia Society and Bronx Academy of Art and Dance. He performed with Pilobolus, Alison Chase, Nikolais/Louis, Anna Sokolow, Rebecca Stenn, Lisa Giobbi, Janis Brenner, Erin Dudley, Bill Cratty as well as with juggler Michael Moschen, drag artist Sherry Vine, poet John Unterecker and Diné sand painter/healer Walking Thunder. His modern dance mentors are Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin. He studied Philippine folkloric dance with Agrifina Cabebe, H. Wayne Mendoza and Hana G. Trinidad. From Maui, he is a hula student of Kumu Hula Hōkūlani Holt, June Ka‘ililani Tanoue and Kawika Alfiche. Photo by Julie Lemberger.
John-Mario’s Research:
I have been a haumana hula (student of hula) for the last 20 years. Before hula, I was a Philippine folkloric and modern dancer. My life-long dance experiences stir up an ongoing personal investigation into this recurring question, Where do I belong? As a child of Filipino settlers in Hawai’i, my sense of place and community has always been refracted and unsettled by ongoing political, economic and cultural tensions among my own family history of migration from one American colony to another; the indigenous Native Hawaiian community and its battle for self determination; and the American-allied forces that overthrew the Hawaiian nation and has since dominated Hawai’i as a territory and now a state. This fraught question of belonging has followed me to California, as I seek to embody my Filipino settler legacy among other settler, colonial and indigenous presences and to imagine a better future. My body has become a laboratory where contrasting philosophies among indigenous, folkloric, colonized and contemporary dance practices can collide, collude, converge and contrast.
Pei-Ling Kao
Pei-Ling Kao is a Taiwanese choreographer, dance educator, and performer. Since moving to the U.S. in 2007, she has been working with choreographers of different aesthetic frameworks, collaborating with interdisciplinary artists, performing and teaching nationally and internationally, as well as presenting original work via her company PEILING KAO DANCES. Pei-Ling is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research and creative interests are focused on movement improvisation, choreography, bicultural movement, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She has received the Board of Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching Award in 2022, Endowment for the Humanities Award in 2018, Junior Faculty Research Award in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Pei-Ling was awarded one San Francisco Bay Area’s Isadora Duncan Dance Awards in 2012 and nominated for another in 2013. She is also a recipient of the Lo Man-Fei Dance Fund from Cloud Gate Foundation in Taiwan in 2016 and the MAP fund in 2021.
Pei-Ling’s Research: We Dance Who We Are
This paper examines my dance training history through the lens of white wash, integration vs. neutralization, dueling consciousness, and decolonization that reflect the journey in making and performing Cover Your Mouth When You Smile. I have been in the dance field for over 30 years, learning different styles of dance in both Taiwan and the U.S. to help intellectually and physically adapt myself to changes in the contemporary dance world. My dance training in conservatories in Taiwan during the ’70s and ’80s, and at the liberal art dance program in the U.S. between 2008 and 2010 reflected political, societal, racial, and cultural issues that were dealt with on two sides of the Pacific. These issues interweave and reinforce the embedded message in the making and dancing in Cover Your Mouth When You Smile.
Rosy Simas
Rosy Simas (She/Hers), Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Heron Clan), is a choreographer and film and visual artist based in Minneapolis. Her work investigates how culture, history and identity are stored in the body and expressed in movement. For more than twenty years she has created work that addresses a wide range of political, social and cultural subjects from a Native feminist perspective. She has received support from Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, First Peoples Fund, Guggenheim Foundation and McKnight Foundation, and she is a Dance USA Fellow as well as a Joyce Awardee.
Rosy’s Research:
In my own desire to decolonize my physical practice, I shed much of what I knew and began to connect deeply with my ancestors, to land, family, and community. In doing so, I built a physical and intellectual approach to dancing, creating, teaching, researching, and negotiating. In working with dancers and students in movement classes or rehearsals, I ask that they attend to the integration between their senses, physical experience, and nature, through a practice of deep listening. Whether creating a new work with seasoned artists or teaching nondancers, I work with people to move improvisation from deeply sourced generated movement unique to who they are. As sensation occurs from their movement, when sensory receptors detect sensory stimuli, I ask them to look at the ways that perception can organize, interpret, and interpolate conscious experience from their sensations.