This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date.
Join Dr. Rachel da Silveira Gorman for a lunch and lecture highlighting works by artists who engage in the work of grieving and historicizing contemporary violence through dance, animation, testimony, and repetition, drawing our attention to the body caught by borders, institutions, and war. These artists anchor their work in their bodies, on the land and in unfolding transit and return in order to reveal the violence of the settler colonial state, its imperialist adventures and its proxy wars.
Gorman argues these works engage aesthetic modes that reject postcolonial catharsis, through which we are asked to pity and then purge our knowledge of imperialism’s victims. Rather, these works animate an aesthetics of revolutionary grieving, which demand that we “apprehend the policies creating unlivable, un-grievable conditions” (Bryd, Transit of Empire). This talk is part of a larger project that draws on curatorial and performance-based research and contemporary Black, Indigenous, and mad studies, in order to articulate an embodied theory of anticolonial aesthetics.
In the evening, da Silveira Gorman will offer a dance masterclass open to all bodymind types and all dis/abilities.
Sponsored by the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme and the Department of Dance.
Bio:
Dr. Rachel da Silveira Gorman is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of the Critical Disability Studies at York University, and an artist working in dance theatre, performance and curating. Da Silveira Gorman’s research engages theory and method from fine arts, cultural studies, and social sciences; and focuses on transnational social movements, anticolonial aesthetics, anti-racist disability theory, and critiques of ideology. Her writing has appeared in Auto|Biography Studies, American Quarterly, Somatechnics, thirdspace and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Da Silveira Gorman has created and choreographed 14 dance-theatre and site-specific productions, ten of which have been remounted or screened at festivals. Active in the disability arts movement in Canada since 1999, she has been a movement director for several solo theatre artists and collectives, and she teaches choreographic process in disability, BIPOC and queer arts communities.
Since 2009, she has been on the curatorial committee at A Space Gallery, where she has curated four exhibitions, and has participated in annual programming. In 2017, she received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for a performance-based research-creation project Year Five of the Revolution. She is a longtime organizer in feminist and anti-colonial movements.
