SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture |Technology presents:
re-OrientationS
We re-orient because we must. Moving towards our destiny means leaving something back. This mixed-media|live-processing performance combines soundscaping, VR explorations, dance performance, projection mapping and storytelling to craft an immersive experience of Black thought and Black wonderment.
Afrofuturism. Afropessimism. the sore loser. Becoming... The quartet of artists each contribute from electronic workstations into a central area of discovery, as an audience witnesses from a three-sided periphery. How do four artists contribute to a shared making of sound, light, projection, text, dance? How will they bring their expertise near each other in an unusual assembly of technologically-enhanced revelations? The work emerges from an archive of possibilities assembled in the wild contours of the imagination set free to dream... Black Queer Life as sourcecode for imagining the collective futures we share…
TICKETS
$12 - $42
FEATURED ARTISTS
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Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
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.
Books: 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, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004).
Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing.
Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars.
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. Visit the website at www.slippage.org.
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Gulf Coast-bred movement artist, dreamy storyteller, and cultural organizer.
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ABOUT SLIPPAGE
SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture | Technology is a think-tank and interdisciplinary performance research group that explores connections between performance, history, theater, and emergent technology. Under the direction of Northwestern University professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, SLIPPAGE builds on the urgent need for intentional, critical, and timely interaction among artists, researchers, audiences, engineers, faculty, students, and general publics in the arts.
SUPPORT FOR re-OrientationS
SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture | Technology
Northwestern University School of Communication
SPECIAL THANKS
Chicago Dancemakers Forum; Abstract Black: Affective Evidentiary participants; Dancing a Black Social participants